Habits and Identities Revealed via Coupons – Facebook Fan Pages Can Make User ID Visible – Shopping Algorithms Reduce Privacy And Increase Visibility

This makes for very good privacy information here with this article. What in the world can that coupon do? We all should know by now we live in the world of steroid analytics so everything that someone can look at and forecast with, they do!

My 85 year old mother is even profiled from her grocery store. We had this discussion a few months ago as now the coupons she receives in the mail are for products she buys or similar types of products. Coupons and those “discount” cards are busy collecting data and others are analyzing it.

Do you maybe have a discount coupon to use from a drug company? Well guess what, we now have new data! The world wants you addicted to coupons by all means. The paper coupons can bring in information almost as well as the non paper ones on your phone, but they are not as efficient.

If you join a site as this article states on Facebook as a fan, well guess what, there just might be link so if you are into privacy matters, you may think about what sites you want to become a “fan” of too. If you become a fan of “The Pink Pill” company, well that company can now have the potential to market you easier.

Algorithmic marketing has arrived.

In the example below your Facebook ID can be embedded into a bar code so if you have a coupon let’s say for a trial 7 day prescription and you use it, well guess what, somebody at a pharma company knows you filled it if they have used that option. Remember this one from Facebook not too long ago that had a connection to games played?

Have You Been Suckered In by FaceBook to Play Games To Support Employer and Insurance Company Reform Initiatives?

There are not a whole of rules out there on some of this and the data bases keep by pharmacy benefit managers can and are bought and sold for profit for desired information whether it be for checking compliance or behavioral or other underwriting purposes. The link below offers more information on how some of the marketing is done with medication data.

Data Mining Marketing Amendment on Senate Health Bill – So Our Medication Records Can Still Be Sold Just not Marketed, Huh?

This brings me around to the coupons again in asking that if someone uses one, will they be marketed by other companies with similar drugs? Also, will this information slide over to underwriting areas to show that even if a person just used a medication for a 7 day trial to show that in medical records, just by linking coupon information? This is a lot to think about with coupons with healthcare and when you read the rest of the original article from below, it certainly offers a lot of food for thought. Some pharma companies have a place where you can sign up online and then take the request to your doctor, the coupon in other words, but in this instance they don’t need Facebook for the connection as you have already filled in the blanks.

My personal opinion on coupons is that for me they are as big a waste as the paper printed on, and I mean those from both the grocery and drugs stores, the receipts get thrown away.

We are back once more to the algorithms that can either provide more privacy or take it away. BD

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.

“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”

“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”