Making Tracks: Loyalty Cards As Consumer Surveillance

Citation

Smith A & Sparks L (2003) Making Tracks: Loyalty Cards As Consumer Surveillance. In: Turley D & Brown S (eds.) European Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 6. Association for Consumer Research, pp. 368-373. http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=11294

Abstract
We investigate ethical and privacy issues concerning the use by retailers of loyalty card (club-card) transaction records. To investigate these issues we use one individual record for our case study (selected from a random sample of two-year purchase records of 254 cardholders from a major UK retail loyalty scheme). The individual selected has the greatest number of transactions, and therefore more data to interpret/reveal than others in the sample. This data record is interpreted to develop a 'picture' of an individual. The direction and extent of our interpretation raises ethical and privacy issues. Such issues are becoming increasingly important given loyalty scheme, technology, competition and surveillance developments.