explain

They always try to get me to punch in my loyalty card when buying (only) tobacco even though you don't get points on the purchase. It's made me wonder what they're doing with that data, and selling it to insurance companies came to mind.

You don't need a loyalty number to track purchases made on the same debit/credit card numbers (though it may improve it slightly).

I generally retire loyalty cards after a few months and ask for a new one next time I checkout. I also never fill in the phone number or other information.

But still I generally pay with cc/debit cards so the banks still know where, not necessarily what, but how much I spent.

What benefit is there in retiring loyalty cards? Creating noise to deflect data collection? Optimizing for returns on some financial aspect?

just use cash for tobacco.

So you eat lot's of unhealthy stuff?

While we are covering your high blood pressure medication?

Well, I guess we'll just increase your rates then...

That's no change. Between customer loyalty cards and the easy ability to tie purchases to credit cards, if they wanted to do that they already could.

I'm not sure it buys them anything, though. That's a very noisy signal against the loud-and-clear signal of what the measurements say when you come in to the doctor. Who cares what your shopping habits say when you come in with high blood pressure and morbid obesity, or good blood pressure and normal weight?

The change is specifically in in-store behavior. And even that's more because Amazon has the money and skillset to fund the software; the supermarkets already have the data in the sense that they have the video streams, they just don't have the money to fund people running beyond-cutting-edge vision research on it to get that level of analysis.

Of course they would have the money, but things work fine for them right now.

And they are not technology companies.

I agree with you, a lot of that data would already be available. The question is how much more willing Amazon would be to sell the data, compared to supermarket chains. Probably it's not difference.

I was just extrapolating what the OP meant.

I personally would really love shopping like that.

If I knew my loyalty card was being used for insurance, I'd have two: one for healthy stuff linked to my real name, and another for everything else (linked to a fake name).

I doubt Amazon is in the business of selling your data to insurance companies.

Only because its not profitable yet? Or do you have some other reason?

Why wouldn't they, have they demonstrated some level of ethics or concern for personal privacy?

Because it's literally line 1 of their privacy policy about sharing user data.

>Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

That may be true today but in future, all they need to do is notify you that there has been a change in their privacy policy to permit them to share it with third-parties.

Maybe, but does it pass the test of "Would it make sense?". Ok sure Amazon could make a few bucks by selling the data to health insurance companies but does it make sense for Amazon to do that? Amazon customers find out, get mad and then stop buying stuff on Amazon. Health insurance companies know their customers buy junk food. There's tons of data about buying habits and population stats of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Their premiums already incorporate all this. Knowing the buying habits of their customers on Amazon isn't going to be of much value to them.

Amazon has done several manners of shady things. Remember when kept raising prices on products people bought often to assess what individuals would pay? Or how about the way they treat their workforce?

Amazon, and many other companies, do plenty of things that don't "make sense".

Sure they don't sell it, just like Google and FB don't sell their data to advertisers. They package it in a way where they can auction a derived data set (often via advertising) or charge subscription fees to access some version of it.

They don't have to give up the core data asset to be useful to insurance companies in this case. They just have to do something like give people a health score or something similar.