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."

Comments

Not just the government uses this data

[bwass24]

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?

Very Close Call IMHO

[FreeUser]

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.