Selling Your Soul...For A Free Sub Sandwich

Several decades ago a local grocery store chain gave out little plastic cards to put on your keychain. The purpose for the little cards was to scan it each time you went shopping and you'd get a discount. People loved it and pretty soon, an average keychain had several little plastic cards from several different businesses.

The big question is, what were we giving up and for what cost?

I remember being in college at the time those cards first appeared. One of my professors explained that the main purpose of the little cards was not to give shoppers discounts on their items, but to give companies all sorts of information on the shoppers. It was explained to us that because of those little cards, a company could find out so much about the users. For example--if a family did all their grocery shopping at that store, the following things would be known just because they used that card:

The number of people in the family

The ages of the members of the family

The genders of the family members

What pets/how many pets the family has

And that's just the big things. Other things known:

Everyone's favorite foods

Everyone's favorite desserts

Special diets anyone is on

And by doing a little data manipulation, how much money the household makes.

I know I'm forgetting other things--this is just off the top of my head. The companies got all this information and they didn't even have to contact anyone in the family--ever. It's quite a sucess for those paying for the data.

I've sort of forgotten about how I used to think about those things way back then. Because data storage is so cheap nowadays, every store, every social network, every cellphone company, and every web browser collects information. We're so used to it, it's an afterthought that companies and governments know pretty much everything about us.

It wasn't the congressional hearings going on now that made me think of this again--it was the free sub sandwich I got at my local grocery store today. The sandwich was free because we've--over time--bought so many subs, they throw us a free one now and then. No, we didn't sell our soul just for a free sub. It was for everything else.