When did I buy diapers from Exactis? I’ve never even heard of them.
I know exactly what my Safeway card is used for. I also deliberately do not register my phone number or other information to it. Of course they can probably associate it with my credit card but these things are easy to reason about.
The real problem is combining all these datasets in one place for the purpose of perpetuating information asymmetry as a product.
So actually yes, the problem is that this dataset of every single American exists.
You seem to believe you can ward off information collection efforts by controlling yourself what you do and do not communicate to the rest of the world.
While I sincerely admire the quixotic effort, I suspect you are fighting a losing battle.
There are countless situations in daily life where you have no choice but to leak some tiny bit of information about yourself to an external database, and from there on, it's just a matter of cobbling the bits back together.
> and from there on, it's just a matter of cobbling the bits back together
Maybe it shouldn't be. The bit of info I gave about myself I gave (even if implicitly) to a specific entity for a specific purpose. To sell or give that bit to another unrelated, unknown to me entity for an entirely different purpose is a violation.
You have misunderstood my comment. I realize I have no control over what Safeway does with my information or if they or someone else correlates it with other datasets. The data Safeway has is fine by me until it is correlated with other datasets.
That leakage may be inevitable but the correlation is not. We just allow it today. GP claimed that the existence of the Exactis dataset was not a problem. I disagree. That dataset exists only because many disparate sets were linked with that inevitable leakage.
>The real problem is combining all these datasets in one place for the purpose of perpetuating information asymmetry as a product.
Rephrased, the real problem is (currently) what happens once it gets combined with that wealth of other data (that's been purchased, shared, snooped and swindled) belonging to our data overlords like Google.
>Of course they can probably associate it with my credit card
Or if you've ever furnished an ID for some age restricted purchase while also using the loyalty card. Then of course theres location data from Android/smartphone, vehicle telemetry (mfg, finance company, mobile data service, OnStar, anti-theft service, insurance co 'safe-driver' tracking device), members of the Telco mafia (VZW,AT&T, etc.), video surveillance providers running facial & license plate recognition, et cetera.
Safeway may outsource the collection and management of this data to a third party and that company may have a lot of clients and hence records of a lot of people.
I have no idea if that's what Exactis is / does and people may not be aware of this, but it's the reality.
EDIT looks like Exactis gets information on users through cookies, which is not the scenario I wanted to highlight.
In your example does Safeway need to do all the data analysis on their own? Why can’t they contract out to others to analyze the rewards card data. Rarely do I know every subcontractor a business I interact with is using at the time.
I think people are worried about their data being sold, not some limited chain of custody where the data is only being used for the original merchant's analytics.
I know exactly what my Safeway card is used for. I also deliberately do not register my phone number or other information to it. Of course they can probably associate it with my credit card but these things are easy to reason about.
The real problem is combining all these datasets in one place for the purpose of perpetuating information asymmetry as a product.
So actually yes, the problem is that this dataset of every single American exists.