We Know All About You

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As you drive into one of our local supermarkets, you are given a personalised greeting, or at least your car is. This is probably part of the car parking system as the first hour is free and there are terminals at the store entrance to deal with it. The supermarket, like most, operates a loyalty card scheme, so they know what you shop for, your average spend and use this information to send enticing offers to temp you into returning. As they are recording car number plates and the times of entering and leaving, it wouldn't take much computing power to link vehicles to a particular loyalty card. This store doesn't sell fuel, so this is probably the best way to link cars to shoppers. This is a fair amount of information; personal information, and I wonder how much a supermarket chain needs and is the mass of data available for sale to other companies. For myself, I do have a loyalty card, which I frequently forget, anyway, and I do all my shopping on a bicycle. Hopefully, I am a bit of a mystery to them.