Privacy Disclosed

Privacy is Yours for the Asking

I wrote earlier about privacy, Big Data and you.

It was a depressing little bit of expressionism with a call to action at the end. I requested the data that was stored on my loyalty card at my supermarket/conglomerate Ralphs. Turns out this is a very complicated thing:

Dear Christopher:
We appreciate you for taking the time to contact us here at Kroger Customer Connect. We have access to dates, times, items purchased, location, fuel points. You will have to narrow it down to a certain time frame because of the extensive amount of information that's included.

To be clear, Ralphs customer service is a highly polished machine which is what you'd expect from parent company Kroger's. So after a few back and forths, they coughed up a 50 page pdf with way too much data about me. Since, seemingly, they couldn't possibly deal with all the data that they have stored about me for the past, um 20 years.

I asked for the past year and this, dear reader, is what I got. Seems I like chicken and mushrooms a lot.