[baddox]

How much do you know about the CEO of Walmart? Do you trust him or her with all your personal shopping history? What about your apartment's building manager? Do you trust him or her to not have hidden cameras in your apartment? How much do you trust the head of state of your country? Do you trust him or her with the almost limitless amount of your personal information that may have been collected?

[spitx]

False equivalency. All over false equivalency.

Walmart isn't a service. Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does. Heck millions of Virgin Mobile accounts have been compromised. But the potential damage isn't even in the same order of magnitude of something (hypothetically) going foul at FB, either owing to deliberate policy or accidentally.

Same with JetBlue with passenger data some years ago. Not same order. Not same potential damage.

[lifeisstillgood]

Walmart probably has more actionable data - from those purchases of condoms by a married man who did not last year, to the purchases of pregnancy tests of the woman who curiously appears just after him at the till register on lunchtimes.

Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't fit his girlfriend but will fit has 42" shirt size

there is a lot out there that is not parseable from photos even with gis data embedded

why do you think fb wants us to "share" our shopping data

[just2n]

You can purchase things at Walmart with cash. It's pretty much impossible to track purchases made with cash. You can't pay with an anonymous money source on the internet, and you can't obtain that much anonymity on Facebook.

[lifeisstillgood]

You can choose to pay with cash. You can choose to not surf with cookies or use Facebook.

You can choose not to buy, with cash or not, trackable devices like cameras, phones, video games

But people do not choose these things en mass

The issue lies in how we regulate - I believe any form of tracking or surveillance on or offline should be required to produce raw near real time feeds. There is no reasonable way we can regulate without knowing what is being collected - and becoming outraged by it's collection.

Either these should be restricted by identifiable people or published if unidentifiable.

I want my purchase history from wal mart

[bad_user]

If you can't wear some kind of mask a store could use face recognition for tracking customers. And I predict stores from the UK will start doing just that.

Yes you can pay with cash, but you have to be physically there to do that and until we'll be able to make anonymous payments on the Internet, nothing can guarantee that you are anonymous.

[w1ntermute]

Uh, are you kidding me? If I'm ever buying anything questionable at Walmart, I just use cash. I usually buy condoms from Walmart, and I always use cash (and no, I'm not cheating on my girl). You're not thinking this through.

[lifeisstillgood]

The point I was making was that with electronic transactions, discovering or infering information about a person from their purchases has just as much value as say working out someon is gay from their friends list or choice of netflix.

Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.

[w1ntermute]

> Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.

How exactly is it becoming a "ghetto"? I have never seen any retail stores or restaurants refuse to take cash. In fact, the only place where I've encountered that issue is for buying gas. In big cities, like NYC, there are still restaurants where they only take cash.

[baddox]

> Walmart isn't a service.

I don't really know what distinction you're trying to make here.

> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does

This probably varies from person to person. Walmart potentially has medical prescription data, which is inherently sensitive, but also a ton of data on nearly every product you buy and your shopping habits (obviously, only for people who buy nearly everything from Walmart, which is a lot of people), and of course credit card numbers. And some people (like myself) don't have a huge amount on Facebook. All I've got is my name, high school, college, current employer, a few movies, books, and musicians I "liked" ages ago when I first signed up, plus a tiny amount of private but nonsensitive chat history and a handful of unflattering photographs.

Regarding Virgin Mobile and JetBlue customer information: I find it hard to imagine that either of these wouldn't have way more sensitive information than Facebook for the average user/customer of each organization.

[spitx]

Walmart, even when it's potential for misuse of customer data is taken to it's negative extreme, is just a vendor. Not a repository of your most private data. Walmart cannot deduce from your pictures printed at their photo kiosk if you are having an extra-marital affair. It doesn't have that kind of "putting together two and two" power. Plus it doesn't share that with your other family members or suggest to them that they get to know your extra-marital partner better.

Where am I going with this...scratch this reply.

If you can't see the potential for abuse at FB (or any other similarly massive soc-net) and somehow are trying to draw parallels to some big box vendor with no social tentacles, my explanation will not advance your understanding of it either.

No current corporation, conglomerate or organization - Disney, Visa, Experian, Equifax, Transunion, ExxonMobil, Monsanto - has that kind of established and potential scope for intrusion into your life.

Not even Acxiom has that kind of potential.

[philwelch]

> Walmart cannot deduce ... if you are having an extra-marital affair.

Sure they can. Let's suppose my purchasing history fits the profile of a married couple, maybe even with telltale signs like feminine hygiene products. The purchases are made on weekends, at whatever time married couples go shopping for groceries and other household essentials.

But suddenly there's a new pattern--at previously unexpected times, I buy incriminating products like condoms, cologne, unusual jewelry, stuff that doesn't fit the profile. I'm pretty sure Walmart can get a pretty decent probability that I'm having an extramarital affair. Why not? Target can already tell when you're pregnant, for instance.

[blang]

article to back this up: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

[baddox]

> No current corporation, conglomerate or organization - Disney, Visa, Experian, Equifax, Transunion, ExxonMobil, Monsanto - has that kind of established and potential scope for intrusion into your life.

I think that is a preposterous claim. Airlines know every vacation and business trip you've ever taken. Credit reporting agencies probably know more about your financial well-being than even you do. Heck, credit card companies know every financial transaction you perform.

I don't really buy the argument you started to form about how other companies can't "put two and two together." What makes you think that? Amazon certainly uses their data to make recommendations to me. Walmart can't personally target you in the store, but I'm sure they do with online purchases. There is nothing stopping Walmart from looking at your photos and deducing things, other than company policy and laws (so, the exact situation Facebook is in).

[intended]

Yeah but airlines don't know if you are flying with your mistress or your sister.

And credit reporting agencies don't have your IMs, or know that you mailed hotchick2012 43 times this week, and started doing so 5 months before you changed your profile status from its complicated to single.

Walmart doesn't have facial recognition cameras up in every store tracking you. So you can just go to another store and make your purchase, keeping all your patterns intact.

The issue with putting 2 and 2 together is an issue which reared its head only post the camibrian era like IT explosion.

The old big box retailers do not have the same level of connection to your thoughts and personal information the same way online companies do.

They could do that, but only after they drastically upgraded themselves to specifically start profiling and tracking each individual - essentially by becoming more like facebook/social networks.

Your argument soars and falls depending on how connected to your personal information/social network a retailer is.

The only likely exception to that is your pharmacist - their domain of knowledge gave them pretty deep insights into your life even before the advent of the net.

[philwelch]

> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does.

Really? All Facebook knows is what I tell it; a mixture of truth and lies. Walmart knows what I buy from Walmart, which is potentially everything. They know when I'm getting fatter or when I'm losing weight; they know when I'm buying condoms and when I'm not; they know what I eat, what I read, whether I have pets, what kind of pets I have, and they can data mine me a hundred ways to figure out everything else. Facebook doesn't actually know anything I care much about keeping private. Walmart knows a lot more.