Privacy

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Loyalty cards sharing app (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi, I was wondering if there is an app that enables loyalty cards sharing. When you open it, you can enter your card code of the Store. Now you can use a card of any other participant who entered his own card for the Store (the backend will send a random one) and your code can be used by anyone else using the service. Usually the cards are just permanent ID (shown as a bar code), so it shouldn't be that hard to implement.

While using this, the shop would have no chance of creating a profile on you and tracking you (as the purchases would be “random”), they have these data anyway. You would only give up the data you fill in when you ask for the card.

Do you know something like this? Or am I missing something important, or do you see some major flaws in this design (I don't use loyalty cards, but sometimes they could be quite useful)? Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It would be nice, but the important part is to apply for a loyalty card with fake credentials. If you apply for a card with your real name and then let somebody else use it, that just makes stuff weird.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When you sing up for such a card, do they usually check it? I can image some stores checking your ID the first time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

May depend on where you live. Around here they don't.

And you can always say you forgot your ID.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Some do, some don't in my experience. They will still build a profile on whoever uses the card though. Then they just need to tie that to a real identity later. Are you paying with a card with your name on it? Whether they would invest any time putting the profile together this way or not is another matter. But they could.

It's like the data anonymization claims from big tech. Many claim the data they collect is all anonymized, but lots of researchers and studies have shown how easy it is to deanonymize the data and build strong profiles on individual users from anonymized data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This isn't a bad idea, but the original poster's setup is much better for privacy. It would be similar to a VPN with shared IPs, so would obfuscate the individual users by lumping in the shopping habits with tons of other users making any profile built on that cards use unable to be tied to a specific person.

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials, it will still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other revealing financial or tracking information that is unique to that user.