from today’s Guardian
Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country – a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.
read the full article here.
I always wonder why people are so happy to have store cards …
The only storecard I have is Nectar and it would show a very dull pattern of buying catfood and 97RON petrol!
I’m one of those marketing nightmares as I have no brand loyalty and buy lots of my shopping from little local shops using real pennies.
me too. I hate supermarkets, and buy meat from organic online people, veg from the greengrocer, cleaning products from Aldi, with cash, and own not one single store card.
I don’t shop at Tesco but it has little to do with privacy and a lot to do with it’s unhealthy size.
I do have my Nectar card but purely because I spend money at two major supporters, Sainsburys and Debenhams, and I begrudge others having the benefit of the scheme and not me.
oh, I do visit Sainsburys or Waitrose from time to time. I won’t set foot inside Tesco – they’re a rapacious company, who have an entirely unhealthy share of the grocery market.
I have a Boots store card – mainly because it builds up 4 points per pound spent, and they round up (so if I spend 51 I get 3 points). And I have always figured that if I was ever really so broke, well, I can use the points on my Boots card to get sanitary towels.
I do prefer to shop at Boots rather than at Lloyds, but it has less to do with the store card than with the Lloyds attitude towards the morning-after pill (permits pharmacists to refuse to dispense in a “freedom of conscience” clause in their contract). I buy at my local chemist probably at least as often as I buy at Boots.
And when I shop at Tescos, it’s at the 7-7:30 period when all their baked goods suddenly go down to 10% and you can get croissants for 15p for a bag of four…
I really don’t care if someone is watching what I buy and where I go. Why are they doing it? To tailor deals to me. Fine by me. I can say no to their deals. Why do people get annoyed at being “spied” on at this level?
if you’re happy with it, that’s fine. I’m not setting out to criticse those who are. But I feel that we (as a society) are sleepwalking into a future where we have no privacy at all, whether we want it or not. ID cards, CCTV, store databases, traffic cameras – it doesn’t take rocket science to match all these up, add medical and tax records into the mix, and bingo …
taking it to what seems to me to be a logical conclusion in the next decade or so, would you want medical insurance – or NHS care – declined because they didn’t like your alcohol buying patterns?
I can kind of see the point you’re making but I still don’t think I’ve anything to fear. I’m trying really hard to refrain from the whole “If you’ve nothing to hide…” response.
Actually, I’d be surprised if they manage to tie the databases together in a sensible way within the next ten years.
Tescos are already tying their databases together with the credit reference people, *and* are deliberately designing them so that Freedom of Information requests are difficult to formulate. I find this very frightening.
Given the majority of people pay by credit or debit card there’s not really anything stopping them from tracking a profile even if you don’t have a store card…
Well, what they may find from Other Sources I can’t say, but what Tesco will learn from this household’s use of a single club card is this.
We buy petrol. But only when it’s the cheapest in the area and there’s often isn’t. Or in a dire emergency late at night it’s the nearest one we can stomache.
We RARELY buy odds and sods as the local tesco is a 24 hour one. Rarely more than four or five items, rarely as often as once a month.
And we buy… things with the vochers they send us in any quarter when we’ve actually used the card buying petrol enough times to earn any. Then it’s normally books, CDs, DVDs.
Like the lady in the article, I like Good Food. Which is one reason I rarely shop at tesco. 🙂
cdc
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