Home Depot & Data Mining: yikes.....

[Adam Cathers]

Have you guys run into this yet? I bought, before Thanksgiving, a replacement ceramic light socket, a bunch of .29 cent plastic electric conduit joints, and some random other cheap items....and used my credit card (not HD) to pay for it.

Got an email earlier this week asking me to rate my recent purchase at HD....couldn't figure out their reference but then opening the email it showed images of the various items mentioned above that I bought! Yikes...kinda of crazy tracking....a bit creepy.

Makes me wonder about using my credit card to buy any "secret" power tools since this a joint email account!

Add that to the fact that your cell phone that reports your location constantly.........:eek:

[Peter Quinn]

Yeah, I go on Amazon to look for pneumatic nails, I get an email from Amazon a few hours later advertising nailers on sale, a few days later I am on somebody's web page that is unrelated to wood working, they have add banner space, it is advertising nails and nailers as well as other things I have searched for at other sites. Adds that know its me customized to my shopping habits? Very scary. Not sure how the HD got your email address via the credit card, but I would take steps to put a stop to that. Not sure what those steps are exactly? That is a level of cross pollination I'm not comfortable with. What other info are they sharing and just how secure are these information transfers?

[Daniel Berlin]

Yeah, I go on Amazon to look for pneumatic nails, I get an email from Amazon a few hours later advertising nailers on sale, a few days later I am on somebody's web page that is unrelated to wood working, they have add banner space, it is advertising nails and nailers as well as other things I have searched for at other sites. Adds that know its me customized to my shopping habits? Very scary. Not sure how the HD got your email address via the credit card, but I would take steps to put a stop to that. Not sure what those steps are exactly? That is a level of cross pollination I'm not comfortable with. What other info are they sharing and just how secure are these information transfers?

You know that your credit card company, bank, phone company, etc, sell this kind of info about you, right?
For example, https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/Control.do?body=privacysecur_cnsmr
"For our affiliates' everyday business purposes —Information about your transactions and experiences
Can you limit this sharing?
No."

So just think, it's not just HD bugging him, whatever credit card he used sold all the info about what his transactions were to someone else.
This is usually not done with your name attached, but instead aggregated to say, your zip code, or something.

This was all done well before anything was online. The sad truth is that the online companies are more *transparent* about doing this, and thus, they take more flak for it. In reality, they are probably doing it safer than the other folks selling your data, because anytime there is a slip up it gets posted to large internet sites, whereas if HD loses a hard drive or two containing your info, it rarely gets out (though some states now have mandatory reporting of security breaches)

Most of the online stuff behavioral stuff you can opt out of. See http://www.aboutads.info/choices/
Good luck getting your credit card company/etc to stop selling info about you though.

[John McClanahan]

ebay does the same kind of thing. Even if you are not logged in, ebay remembers items looked at. The next time you go to their web site, you are greeted with similar items "Recommended For You" all over the home page. Made me cut way down on my ebay shopping at work!

John

[Charlie Barnes]

The credit card companies use (my term) pattern tracking to understand your normal buying practices, travel patterns, etc. That's why you occasionally hear of somebody on vacation in an area where they haven't been before being contacted by their card company to verify if they've made a purchase. They want to guard against unauthorized purchases using stolen card numbers. Basically they establish a baseline for each customer and look for variation about that. Anything unusual (cost, location, item) may trigger a flag on their end. We use some similar logic at my work to track the performance and repair patterns of individual parts on our products (cars). Anything outside of a uniquely calculated individual range sets a flag for a manual review. (Need a good old human engineer to look at what the dumb computer thinks is the beginning of a problem.)

Anyway, what you describe isn't all bad since Lowes (maybe HD too) can handle returns without a receipt as long as you have your card with you.

Charlie

[Curt Harms]

There are a few things you can do to limit this. I use FireFox for a browser and use adblockplus and noscript extensions. There are other FireFox addons that are supposed to help protect your privacy. I also have it set to delete 3rd party cookies after every session. For email addresses any entity who doesn't have a legitimate need for my email address gets either a totally bogus email address or one I keep for such occasions and clean out when the mood hits me.

[Phil Thien]

I very much doubt HD needs your CC company for any of this information.

Say you go to HD's web site and order something w/ the CC, and (of course) provide an E-Mail address. Now they have an E-Mail address associated w/ the CC. Or, perhaps you go to a store and special order windows, or carpeting. You provide an E-Mail address so they can send a confirming order or tracking information. That is another way for them to tie credit cards to E-Mail addresses.

Now whenever you go to the store and use that same CC, they know your E-Mail address.

What else do they know?

Well, if you have ever provided a shipping address, they can tell how much your house is worth. Based upon your address and your yearly purchases, they can probably fairly accurately determine your income. If you have ever provided a work phone #, they probably can figure out where you work (although the value of this is probably worthless to HD but quite valuable to other organizations that would try to sell you something).

[Rich Engelhardt]

Yep - it's a brave new world.

You can always pay cash if you prefer. (not online of course)

If you want to sitll use a credit card & also reap additional benifits, you could buy HD gift cards, then use those to make your purchases.
Giant Eagle supermarket around my house sells gift cards for HD. For each $50.00 spent, they knock $.10 off a gallon of gas at Get Go.

[James White]

I heard a radio broadcast the other day. That some stores HD included are trying something new. Tracking you through the store via your cell phone!

[Jerome Hanby]

I have had a similar experience with Shopsmith. For quite a while, every time I looked at something on their site, I would receive an email with a sale price on that item and accessories. I never bought anything as a result of those emails and they eventually tapered off to just the regular sales emails...

[Dan Hintz]

I heard a radio broadcast the other day. That some stores HD included are trying something new. Tracking you through the store via your cell phone!
Two malls in one area were trying that this season. They shut it off after one weekend (or was it a single day?) after complaints from consumer advocacy groups screamed bloody murder about privacy concerns. I don't believe it has been tried anywhere else since then.

[Chris Parks]

I read an article in a newspaper that described how stores were embedding nano technology tracking devices in retaill items such as clothes so they could track shoppers through malls etc. That is really scary.

[Kent A Bathurst]

You will be assimilated.

Resistance is futile.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Has anybody read Orwells "1984"?

[Dan Hintz]

I read an article in a newspaper that described how stores were embedding nano technology tracking devices in retaill items such as clothes so they could track shoppers through malls etc. That is really scary.
Doesn't really make any sense... either a reporter used some serious artistic license (i.e., they don't understand science), or it was a "future" piece (as in, "We'll be putting this into production within the next 2-3 years"... which never happens).

[Jim Rimmer]

The credit card companies use (my term) pattern tracking to understand your normal buying practices, travel patterns, etc. That's why you occasionally hear of somebody on vacation in an area where they haven't been before being contacted by their card company to verify if they've made a purchase. They want to guard against unauthorized purchases using stolen card numbers. Basically they establish a baseline for each customer and look for variation about that. Anything unusual (cost, location, item) may trigger a flag on their end.

A few years ago I got a call from Master-card that my cc had been cloned. During the discussion I asked what alerted them and the answer was: "You have not been to Los Angeles in 3 years and you never shop at the Gap."

[Dave Lehnert]

You can try to avoid this but is almost impossible. If you want to save money shopping you have to use "Your card" or pay the over inflated regular price.
If you ever see what places that does background checks can come up with, you would be shocked. I bet once a day I will start to respond to a post here at SawmillCreek but end up canceling it out. Just a little information like " The ABC tool company warranty is not the best, go with the EFG tool company" Can come back to bite you 10 years for now if you happen to be looking for a new job and your new employer does work for the ABC tool company.

[Mark Ashmeade]

I don't see any problem with it if it is done by reputable companies.

I buy a lot of things from Amazon. I get reliable service and excellent pricing. I get an email once a day promoting whatever I've been looking at. When I go to sites with Google Adsense advertising, they will show me ads for whatever I have been googling.

It is, at the end of the day, their data, not mine. I don't collect statistics on what I've been looking at on the internet or where I've used my credit card.

However, if I was running those businesses, I certainly would do the same. It was about 20 years ago that I saw an article on data mining. Apparently beer and diapers are often sold together. The guy gets sent for diapers. He sees it as "for her". So he buys something "for him". No problemo from where I'm sitting.