From Pine View Farm

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At the Washington Monthly, Karina Montoya has a long and detailed article about how advertising strategy is changing once again. In the past decade, advertising moved to “social” media, with a disturbing side effect of eroding the business models of legitimate news organizations. Now, she argues, retailers are marketing personal information gathered through loyalty programs, credit card purchases, and the like to advertisers. The entire piece is worth a read, but this particular bit caught my eye:

Recently, I got curious about what CVS might know about me through my participation in its ExtraCare loyalty program. After accessing the CVS website, I requested the records it had about me. CVS—a conglomerate whose mergers and acquisitions include Aetna insurance, Caremark, and physician practices like Oak Street Health—knows a lot about me. In addition to my shopping history of the last 12 months, CVS knows my ethnicity, country of origin, household location, income level, types of credit cards, homeowner status, and interest in weight loss, vitamins, and natural foods. And there are little or no regulatory barriers to CVS using this data to sell me stuff or letting others use it to target me with ads.

Corporations, not the government, are your “surveillance state.” And we walk nekkid through its streets every day.

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