Over lunch, I’ve just read the consumer column ‘Dear Leo’ in The Guardian. This week deals with Nectar reward points, and the information sharing that goes on. In a nutshell, LMUK, which operates Nectar on behalf of the companies which participate, claim that participants cannot access spending details from other participants.
If that’s true, my earlier fears seem to be unfounded. Nectar only gets summary information about spending amounts (or redemptions) at participating stores. There’s no finer grained analysis at LMUK - They’re just the middle men managing the points scheme.
Consequently, the idea that Vodafone and Sainsbury’s can cross-check customers and build larger models of consumer behaviour and groupings (I know you, and we both shop at Sainsbury’s, and both like a certain type of Wine…) seems to be largely unfounded.
However, I’m still sceptical. It seems, from the query and response, that not only is there some widespread concern over the scheme, but there is also a lot of obscurity in the small print over what is, and perhaps more importantly, isn’t shared by companies. Is there anything in the small print of them agreeing to combine their databases (ie. outside of the Nectar scheme), using the Nectar customer identifier as a join clause? They’d still get where I fear they would like to get, using only their databases, and the Nectar identifiers.
Hmmm. One to ponder. Possibly even an e-mail to Leo Hickman on this thought at some point in the future.
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