Home Depot Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

[Kyle]

We are the commodity.

Last weekend, I bought a 12 foot roll of exterior door, self stick seal. You know: the stuff to close the gaps in your back door. I paid about $3.50. I did nothing to identify myself at self-check out. I told it to print my receipt (I never want them to email it to me) and paid with my debit card. Two days later, I get an email from Home Depot that says, "We see you just bought 12' Adhesive Door Seal! Please leave a review!" The only way it knew that I had purchased it was because I used a debit card. Which means that they are harvesting every purchase I make, that I'm sure sits in a database somewhere.

But then I thought- "Well, I did register with Home Depot when I bought my washer/dryer and gave them my email address. So maybe it's not as insidious as I think."

Enter Walmart. Having never registered with Walmart, I commonly stop by there for a variety of things: shorts, energy drinks, craft shit- you know, random Walmart stuff. Always just with my debit card. Then a couple of years ago, I registered with Walmart for the first time to try their curbside service. After I register and start putting in my order, a pop up comes up that says, "Do you want to order some of these items that you commonly buy?" And there it is- a listing of basically everything I'd bought over a dozen or so trips to Walmart over the last six months. So even though I had never registered with Walmart, given them my email address, or even given them permission- they had a comprehensive database of every purchase I'd made with my debit card.

I know that we often think, "There's nothing we can do about it. Big companies are just going to get all the information about us and that's just the world we live in." When these fears first started a decade ago, a lot of people said, "Look, that's so much data that no one will be able to meaningfully use it." But here we are. Apparently these companies are keeping folios on each of us individually to track every single purchase we make, and then... do what with it? Advertise to us? Certainly it's only as innocuous as that, right?

Enter Lexis-Nexus and GM. Apparently GM's cars keep a database on you for how you drive. A recent NYT article talked about how a man's auto rates shot up through the roof even though he had no accidents, tickets, new vehicles or drivers and no marks on his license at all. He found out that GM sells the record of every hard stop, quick acceleration, evasive maneuver, time/distance driven, etc. to Lexis-Nexus. Maybe location data is sold in this too? Lexis-Nexus then maintains this database and sells it to car insurance companies. So when you apply to Geico (or whoever, I don't actually know if Geico was the company), they can go to Lexus-Nexus and say, "Kyle Jones wants insurance. Can you give me his entire driving record?" Then they run it through their own analytics and give you a quote that can double because your private driving information was harvested and sold.

We are living in a scary wild-west where big companies are completely unregulated and can essentially recreate our lives without our knowledge. They know every purchase we make. They know every place we go. They know how and how fast we got there. And then if you plug that in a big enough computing system, and who knows what conclusions they can draw about us.

[Phoebe]

My f****** car... It doesn't understand my eyes so it constantly beeps and thinks that I'm not looking at the road. If they sent my data it would be that an eyeless person or zombie of some kind is driving the vehicle. I hope they do send that data everywhere.