[Year 12 IT Apps] Newspaper Article: Privacy on the net

ken price kenjprice at gmail.com
Wed May 26 08:55:03 EST 2010


Thanks Cameron/User 2384736 ;-)

That is an article that students should appreciate.

I'm particularly interested in the loyalty card issues (frequent shopper
cards etc). I went to a meeting once where a rep from one of the larger
retail chains showed how the data willingly handed over through the use of
loyalty cards provided the retailers with a massive source of information.
They process this intensively in ways that shoppers are probably unaware of.

For example, knowing that shoppers in supermarkets near university campuses
tend to buy coffee in large cans, frozen vegetables and bulk pot noodles on
Thursday nights means they can arrange stock accordingly in those stores. On
the other hand you may not want the retail chain to be able to see that you
buy supermarket pizza, frozen garlic bread and bottles of soda water at the
supermarket then head to their liquor franchise and buy a bottle of whiskey
every night when you're marking exams. (I'm sure you can dream up some
buying pattern more incriminating than that, but you get my drift)

But sadly I can't find much about this sort of retail data mining on the
web. Anyone know of good Australian articles showing what is and can be done
with this simple data? May be of use with students I think.

Cheers
Ken
TASITE www.tasite.tas.edu.au

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Cameron Bell <
bell.cameron.p at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:

>
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/forget-facebook-privacy-your-digital-life-is-being-monitored-20100525-wavc.html
>
> The first three paragraphs are amazing. (And scary)
>
> Cheers
>
> User: 2384736
>
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