Quote:
Originally Posted by DeWynter
Believe it or not, but you are traceable even with a cash. Coles/Wollies can identify a person even with a cash purchase. Your groceries shopping cart is quite unique to you (even if you are purchasing different items from time to time). Person identification rate at big chain stores is about 80% accuracy (and obviously 100% if you are using card or loyalty card). This is called Big Data and to be fair it's quite scary what can be done with these "anonymous" data.
What else is unique to you? Your movement within a city. Person identification rate for that is almost 100% accuracy - it's almost like your fingerprint. So even if you buy a clean mobile phone with a fake ID your mobile device movement within the city is recorded by mobile service provider and they can identify a person. Not sure if they actually using it and keeping all that data, but it can be done if required.
So, let's put tinfoil caps on... 
As for me... I was working in a bank for many years and I'm not using cash. I do have it, but it's only for "emergency". |
I noticed this morning, when I went to a Woolies self serve checkout, that my image appeared in a small window on the scanner screen as I put my bag on the shelf. So it is very likely Woolies is photographing all customers that use self service. This seems to be a very recent step, and one that maybe they hope goes un-noticed. Loyalty cards I would never have, they are just marketing tools and of no value to the customer, and allow your activity to be tracked. I have never "opted in" on anything at Woolies that could be used to ID my buying habits, and am pretty concerned if they are now tracking me. I can imagine they have access to the scanned QR code data (Thanks Covid) and can tie my phone to the image obtained at the scanner.
I will be checking out what Coles is doing in this regard as well. I suspect I will end up driving to IGA in the future, as they seem pretty old school in regard to this sort of thing.