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March 9, 2006
Coming down the doctoral home stretch!
For the last few months, when I haven't been doing radio interviews I've been frantically crunching data and writing up the first draft of my doctoral dissertation. I've already passed my orals, so as soon as I polish the draft into a publishable thesis, I will don the flamingo-colored Harvard doctoral robe and graduate this June with my Doctorate in Education. (Finally.) Hooray!
The topic of my research is supermarket frequent shopper or "loyalty" cards, the issue that got me started on the consumer privacy kick back in 1999. (See http://www.nocards.org) What I discovered by surveying shoppers in several states was quite surprising -- essentially, nobody knows the supermarket is collecting their data when they scan a shopper card.
When we surveyed several hundred people across five states and asked them, essentially, "Do stores use cards to make a record of your individual purchases?" 75% o them answered incorrectly. This is amazing news. It means people are unknowingly handing their data to the marketers and retailers -- not doing so willingly, as the industry would like to have us believe.
-Katherine Albrecht
Posted by Katherine Albrecht at March 9, 2006 5:24 AM