joegratz.net

Privacy groups like CASPIAN have been complaining about the injustices and privacy invasions that supermarket loyalty cards could make possible for many years. They’ve largely been ignored, by everyday consumers and legislators because they trust the supermarkets, and by techno-libertarians because the schemes are so trivially circumvented. (For example, every time I bought groceries at Safeway this past summer, I departed to the sound of the clerk’s cheerful “You have a good evening too, Mr. Schmidtlat.”)

But this story is just the sort of thing CASPIAN has been telling us about for years. A Seattle firefighter was wrongly charged with arson after an investigation of his Safeway buying habits revealed that he’d purchased materials of the same type used to set fire to his own home. Charges were dropped after the true arsonist confessed.

Of course, in the RFID-tagged future (also opposed by CASPIAN), the firefighter might have been exonerated immediately when the unique code in the materials used to burn down the house wasn’t the same as the unique code on the fire-starters purchased using the firefighter’s loyalty card. One doubts, though, that anyone’s likely to argue for more durable RFIDs on this sort of theory.