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Safeway Club Card Leads to Bogus Arson Arrest
Richard M. Smith writes "Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way
that supermarket loyalty cards come with a huge price. Lyons was arrested
last August and charged with attempted arson. Police alleged at the time
that Lyons tried to set fire to his own house while his wife and children
were inside. According to KOMO-TV and the Seattle Times, a major piece of evidence used against Lyons in his arrest was the record of his supermarket purchases that he made with his Safeway Club Card. Police
investigators had discovered that his Club Card was used to buy fire starters of the same type used in the arson attempt. For Lyons, the story did have a happy ending. All charges were dropped against him in January 2005 because another person stepped forward saying he or she
set the fire and not Lyons."
How did police get the record of his Safeway purchases??? Can I go to my local safeway and see my personal record of purchases? What is Safeways Privacy policy... OH NEVERMIND... forgot we live in post 9/11 america.
I can't help thinking Michael posted this so that we could get up in arms, but that's how the system (and life in general) works. It's not always flawless and perfect, and legal investigations can sometimes lead to other areas that turn out to be incorrect. It's likely the authorities would have figured it out eventually. Not that I don't feel for the guy, getting wrongly arrested. But if it happened to me, and it was because of the kind of "evidence" described here, I wouldn't feel wronged in any way. I would understand that it was a valid mistake.
No fire-starters in the party supplies that I remember, but it would make an interesting blip in someone's record. (Especially when we did the same in the liquor store afterwards. Hmm.. One bottle of wine and .. Holy Frack! Red flag their health and car insurance!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Scenario:
- you apply for health insurance;
- your insurer looks up your loyalty card records, and says "I see you've been buying fatty foods, pizza, chips, chocolate. "
- same insurer checks your credit card records: "I see no Gym payments here, you don't work out, do you?"
- "At least you don't smoke, then we'd refuse to insure you at all."
- "OK, we can insure you, it will just cost you much more, because of your lifestyle. We will use any excuse to charge you more."
The same goes for life insurance, or car insurance if you are noted buying alcohol.
I know about the UK Data Protection Act and similar EU laws (I'm a Brit living in Ireland) - I've had people tell me not to worry, this can't happen, the law prevents it. Yes, they do - today - but these laws were put in place by politicians, and can be nullified just as easily, if an apparent reason emerges.
Example: in the UK, what if the Health Secretary is told that prioritizing NHS treatment in this way will save £billions? There goes your legal protection. It might not need to go to a Parliament vote, with the powers (s)he already has. Checking your records for apparent negligence on your part is a lot cheaper than putting you through a physical examination, right?
(this is not a
Having run the loyalty card systems for this and a few other large grocery chains in the early 90's, I have seen a ton of horror stories related to the use of the data.
Some examples:
-A large chain of grocery stores that also had pharmacys sold the data about what medications their customers bought to an insurance company. The insurance company ran the medication list against each policy holder's health insurance info and then cancelled people who bought drugs like heart medication without the insurance company being aware of it.
-Another chain had a promotion tied to their loyalty cards that gave customers a turkey for Thanksgiving based on how much they spent and it also gave them more stuff is they bought specific things. When the statement of exactly what was purchased came to the chain's CEO's home, it revealed to his wife that he bought huge amounts of flowers for his mistress and it resulted in his divorce.
-A single mother who had just lost her young son in a car accident bought some baby gifts in a chain grocery store and used her frequent shopper card when she paid in order to get a small discount. The purchases of these items caused her to be flagged as a new mother and be immediately put on a ton of mailing lists relating to "the joy of motherhood", etc. Hardly a pleasant reminder after losing her only child.
I guess that my point in posting this is that the privacy issues with these cards are quite far reaching. They can have real personal impact and their use should be considered VERY CAREFULLY. They can have benefits that one might find valuable, but they can have devistating and totally unforseen consequences.
Caviat Carrier?
- You could be accused of crime based almost solely on things you bought at the store. The dude put out the fire and called 911. Not exactly a bright arsonist, now is he? I blame the prosecutors as much as the cops. Who looks at a shopping receipt and a tracking dog and thinks they have a case against the person who put the fire out? And the dude was a fire fighter. You'd think someone with intimate knowledge of the business could come up with something that isn't going to leave as much evidence behind.
- Once information about you exists somewhere it can be used for things you might not be able to envision at the time you turned the information over. You bought kerosene for a space heater, fertilzer for your lawn, some batteries and a spare garage door opener because your wife's car is a purse on wheels and she lost it. Then one day Homeland Security is showing up at your door. Unfortunately that's not unreasonably paranoid these days.
Still think you have nothing to hide? What's really pathetic is that people who really know trade craft and are willing to actually do something bad with those materials also know how to make it difficult to track their purchases. If they have an organized network some of those materials may have been purchased months or years previously by middle buyers now long gone who had no idea why they were buying two tons of fertilizer a few bags at a time.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I guess I have more faith in the system.
I don't.
Here in Illinois, 50% of those on death row were proven by genetic analysis to be innocent of the crimes of which they had been convicted.
50%.
One in two people sentenced to death had been wrongly convicted, and were only exonerated pre-mortem because they happen to have enough appeals in place to postpone their executions until a technology came along able to prove they weren't the culprits. These people were in some cases convicted on evidence a hell of a lot more flimsy than a Safeway Club Card purchasing record, and they were sentenced to die.
The numbers were so horrific that our Governor at the time, a Republican who until then had supported the death penalty, placed a moratorium on all further executions in the state, and rightly so.
Of course, this "new" technology, like any other, is falable, and in a case like this one (where everything's gone up in smoke, and where the accused lived there anyway) entirely inapplicable, so lest someone think "but now we have this new panacea, so it won't happen anymore" I can only say, don't kid yourself.
Justice in America is appallingly hap-hazard. Police are lazy. They latch onto a theory they like and make the facts fit their expectations. The lose, damage, and misinterpret evidence all the time. District Attorney's persue careers based on rates of conviction, and often have little concern for the actual guilt or innocence of those they are convicting (there have been a couple in recent memory here in Chicago who have been proven to knowingly convict innocent people, in at least one case because he was more interested in putting the scapegoat behind bars and looking good to an angry public than in serving justice).
Having served on a couple of juries, I can say from my own experience that juries are faced with severely filtered and diluted information, outright misinformation, and a great deal of emotional manipulation from both sides. Their odds of getting something right don't seem to be much higher than what we would get if we simply flipped a coin to determine guilt or innocence.
I understand people who break and run when accused of a crime they didn't commit. The prisons are full of people wrongly convicted, and the streets with people who got away scot-free (and of course the opposite is also true, the prisons are also full of guilty people correctly convicted, and the streets with people justly acquited). It is an utter crapshoot as to whether or not you are correctly found guilty or notguilty, or incorrectly found notguilty or guilty, and this guy got incredibly lucky.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Loyalty programs don't necessarily mean higher prices. Our hardware store uses a loyalty program in order to offer special prices and rebates to our top customers. Our prices did not go up when we started the program, and we still run occasional sales that don't require a loyalty card. We ask for an address on the card application so we can mail the rebate check. We ask for a birthday (month only, and it's optional) so we can send a $10 certificate redeemable that month. Yes, if we wanted to we could discover who bought a plunger to clear their stopped up toilet, or who bought paint chemicals that could be used to make drugs. However, we also can look up your sale so you can return something even if you lost the receipt. We can reprint a receipt quickly if you need it for your taxes or a warranty repair.
Obviously you give up a bit of information to gain some benefit, and that's the case in a myriad of things we do each day. You provide info for credit card applications, job applications, drivers license applications, purchasing items online, etc.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
So, it's OK for the store to collect data of little value and then nullify their customer's right to privacy by providing it to the police so their customers can be falsely accused of a gruesome attempted felony? Are you really supporting this data collection?
BTW, One of the reasons that grocery shopping is such a PIA is the way the marketing idiots have arranged the store as a maze to increase sales. Customers are herded all over a large store just to buy the staple items most people want, with lots of opportunities to buy more stuff en route. Ever wondered why dairy is in one corner, produce is in the next county, etc.? If they'd put each item in one logical location instead of spreading them all over the store, and stop rearranging the store every other month to keep people confused, customers could find what they want and spend half the time doing it. But they'd rather waste your time to produce a 10% larger average grocery bill. Some marketing wiz got a promotion for it. Of course, that promotion was bestowed by the previously promoted room temperature IQ marketing wiz who never considered the obvious fact that customers would shop more often and probably spend more money if the store didn't go out of their way to create a customer hostile shopping experience. Ever find the display you want, and it's empty, then find the same item someplace else in the store where it's co-located with something else? Why don't they just dump all the store contents in a big heap in the middle of a warehouse? That should keep customers looking (and buying) for days.
Where I live, one grocery store, Krogers, has a near monopoly. There are few other decent choices. You think it's OK for a company to coerce customers into giving up their personal data and then a short time later charging them more for this privilege? Is that a legitimate offer, or a deceitful abuse of a near monopoly?
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.