Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there.

My rent is paid through a company called Bilt.

I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so:

    > Hey [inahga],
    >
    > You shopped at Walgreens on 12/1/24 and earned Bilt Points with your
    > Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit.
    >
    > Items eligible for rewards
    > TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ
    > $3.50
    > 
    > +3 pts
    > TOSTITOS RSTC 12OZ
    > $3.50
    >
    > +3 pts
    > Other items*
    > EXCLUDED ITEMS
    > $0.07
    >
    > *May include rewards-ineligible items and/or prescriptions.

Ostensibly (hopefully) it would exclude sensitive items, plan B, condoms, etc...

I'm curious how this data flows from Walgreens to my rent company, but maybe I'd rather not know and just use cash/certified check from now on.

"Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account."

https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/2901187842...

There's that FSA/HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data:

https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens

That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.

> it's a loyalty program

calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..

So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts,

- Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track.

- Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiated pricing is just getting their hands into everyone's pockets.The free market principles rely on perfect knowledge, and every step made to make pricing harder is an attack against self market regulation.

Price discrimination is illegal even in Lobby-land, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/13

Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.

Yes, this is the reason why it's sort of illegal, but done anyways.

Honestly, beyond paying fewer fees on the bus as a kid, I'm pretty sure I'm being scammed everytime I experience price discrimination.

I feel it's easier to make it illegal and give away reasonable credits to all consumers. I wouldn't discriminate in credits either, I'd rather have public transportation being free for all than claim to save money that society needs to spend anyway.

It doesn't help that lying about the price at any point just makes accounting harder, and creates space for wrong, uncompetitive pricing, or awful deals that would hurt business and society in the longer term anyway.

pricing is all made up to begin with though. your can't take the cost to make an item, add a reasonable amount of profit and that's the "real" price. that's just not the reality of running a successful business. human psychology is far too complicated.

at the end of the day, prices are just a number you make up, and hopefully it's a big enough number that your stay in business. hopefully it's a big enough number that you get rich. but sometimes it's a fire sale and you just end up owing less money to your vendors.