Meaning that the data that one company collects about you doesn’t always stay with that company. That brings us to the second thing that some retailers do with the data they collect about you. So if Target can figure out a shopper is pregnant based on their purchases, it seems possible another store could’ve figured out that Hannah had stroke based on her shopping habits.īut obviously, AARP is not a retail store. “There’s a very famous story that everyone knows in the privacy side that involves Target,” said Riley, “which through its own algorithms was able to identify a teenager who was pregnant before even her own family knew.” But you might not expect how sophisticated some stores can get with this.
The first way is what you might expect: they use the data to market their own products to you. Once retailers have all this information about you, they use it in two ways.
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In light of this, retailers have developed clever ways of collecting information about us while we shop: loyalty cards that track your purchases over time, store apps that can take location data from your phone - ever been asked for your zip code at the register? But it doesn’t make sense when you start thinking about retail operations being able to, with complex algorithms, make determinations about what you’re doing.” We have banking law, we have health law,” said Riley. “We have a very sectorial notion of privacy. While your diagnosis of a rash is kept confidential by law, the fact that you bought an over-the-counter cream to treat rashes is not. HIPAA does not protect information about your retail purchases the same way it does your medical records. “You’re probably more truthful in your grocery store buying than in what you tell your physician.” “I could probably tell you more about your health by what you buy in the grocery store than I could through your health records,” said Riley.
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Those hints could be as obvious as limping up to the counter to buy a set of crutches, or something more subtle, like a grocery cart full of gluten-free food. Plenty of things we do outside the doctor’s office, like shopping, leave hints about the state of our health. Because she says, it’s not just medical records. Riley says to figure this out I’ll need to broaden my notion of what counts as health information. NHPR health reporter Jason Moon took on the case and explored the shadowy, complex world of data-collection and targeted advertising. That was the question that Robinson brought to The Second Greatest Show on Earth, NHPR’s new podcast that answers listeners’ questions about New Hampshire.
So I really just kinda wonder if it’s linked,” said Robinson.ĭid AARP somehow find out that Robinson had a stroke? Were they using her medical data to sell her a membership?Is this just a coincidence? “And it’s just very suspicious, the timing, because I obviously had a medical thing that happened that’s more common for people who are 65 and older. Just a few months before she started receiving the mysterious letters, Robinson had a stroke. Something they could potentially use to their advantage. But the more mail she got, the more she began to wonder if the reason groups like AARP seemed to think she was older was not some random mistake, but because they knew something about her. At first, Robinson found all of this a little amusing.
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