More on "Card Games" shopping cards article [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: "J.D. Abolins" <jda-ir () njcc com>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: [priv] FYI: Shopping Cards article's rebuttal and acknowledgement 
by article's author
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 00:06:19 -0400


This was an interesting item from the Baltimore City Paper Online Letters
section (as of Mon 27 Oct 2003; looks like it will scroll of the site soon).
Among other things, it shows how confusing and erroneous info came come up
with some of the privacy issues and activism. (Sometimes, it is the
interpretation of the "they don't but they could" comments that can have a
life of their own. Thus, it becomes important to chase the original sources.
I have gotten burned number of times on this myself. <blush>)

I admire Joab Jackson's integrity in his response when it would be tempting to
schluff off the letter's statements.

J.D. Abolins

http://www.citypaper.com/current/pf/mail_pf.html

Raw Deal

 The "Card Games" article <http://www.citypaper.com/2003-10-01/feature.html>
featured in your Oct. 1 edition misstated that Consumers Against Supermarket
Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) spokeswoman Liz McIntyre "comes up
short" in supplying examples of cases in which supermarket "loyalty card"
data was misused or used against the shopper. In fact, McIntyre, indicated to
the author, Joab Jackson, and later to City Paper's fact checker that
Katherine Albrecht should be contacted for examples. Ms. Albrecht is the
founder and director of CASPIAN, and she is researching supermarket loyalty
cards for her Harvard doctoral thesis.

Other salient misstatements or misleading statements in the article include,
but are not limited to, the following:

Article misstatement: " . . . chances are Catalina knows you. The company
works with about 18,000 supermarkets nationwide (its Web site lists Giant,
Safeway, Food Lion, and CVS as customers, among others), keeping a database
of 100,000 households."

Fact: Catalina Marketing indicates it manages "the second largest real-time
transactional database in the world." Reportedly it has access to up to 65
weeks of historical purchase data and records for over 100 million
households.

Article misstatement: "Although most stores say they don't sell the data to
outside parties, they do frequently sell it to 'partners' or companies that
do business with the stores, CASPIAN claims."

Fact: No one from CASPIAN makes this claim, and this is not indicated at the
CASPIAN Web site, www.nocards.org. In fact, CASPIAN does not believe that the
stores sell this data, though theoretically it could be shared.

Article misstatement: "But contrary to CASPIAN's contention, cardholders do
enjoy good savings from time to time. . . . You may have a Super Savings
Card, but it isn't a Super Duper Savings Card. You're probably not saving
more than you would be in no-card stores."

Fact: CASPIAN and numerous news organizations have shown that shoppers pay
higher prices on average at stores with loyalty cards--even after factoring
in "loyalty card savings." For example, in January 2003, The Wall Street
Journal examined the prices at card and noncard stores in five American
cities (Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Brooklyn, N.Y., and San Francisco). Here is
its reported conclusion: "In all five comparisons, we wound up spending less
money in a supermarket that doesn't offer a card--in one case 29 percent
less."

Article misstatement: "CASPIAN encourages consumers not to use cards when
shopping as a way to send a message to the markets. Some message. Sending
that message to Safeway would have cost you $9.48--payable directly to
Safeway itself."

Fact: While it is true that CASPIAN discourages shoppers from using "loyalty
cards," the author failed to take into account the second crucial part of
CASPIAN's message, which is to boycott stores that require cards to "qualify"
for sales prices. CASPIAN encourages shoppers to seek out privacy-friendly,
card-free stores where the prices are likely to be lower overall. We would
never encourage shoppers to pay higher prices overall at a store that invades
their privacy.

Article misstatement: "CASPIAN's McIntyre paints a picture of a
consumer-friendly Orwellian nightmare. . . . For instance, she postulates, it
would be possible, if not probable, for some fiendish corporation or
government agency to collect a list of every item you own, using the tag
numbers of the items you purchased."

Fact: At no point has anyone affiliated with CASPIAN referred to radio
frequency identification tags (RFID) as "consumer friendly." In fact, we
believe just the opposite.

In addition, a corporation or government does not have to be "fiendish" to
access consumer databases. For example, a business might want to access
records about shopper purchases for marketing reasons. It is probable that
even mainstream companies will be very interested in studying shopper
behavior via RFID data since they already do so with other tools currently in
use.

Katherine Albrecht
 Director

Liz McIntyre
 Communications Director
Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
Nashua, N.H.

Joab Jackson replies: I apologize to Liz McIntyre. She did ask that I speak
with CASPIAN founder Katherine Albrecht about providing examples on store
misuse of shopping card data. Unfortunately, Albrecht was not available
before the article's deadline. Still, it was an egregious error on my part to
infer in the article that McIntyre was speaking for CASPIAN about shopping
cards. I profusely apologize for my mistake and any hardship it might have
caused McIntyre or CASPIAN.


====
The article, "Card Games" is at
http://www.citypaper.com/2003-10-01/feature.html

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