Rebecca Stiles

Well, I think the biggest one in New Zealand was probably flybys, and that started in the late 90s.

Of course, flybys is no longer, and we see more these days as individual stores that are offering their loyalty programs rather than sort of a collective of retail outlets that are controlling the reward points.

Well, I think they've developed as it's gotten easier to collect shoppers' data.

So, for instance, when you go to the supermarket and you swipe the card, the supermarket is getting a view of...

Everything you buy, where you live, they can contact you.

So for instance, Woolworths is closer, so I go there, so I'm signed up to their rewards program and it will now send me, there's like bonus offers or deals, so it sort of can target particular products.

Sort of, you know, your phone number, your email, your address, so they know where you live and they can, you know, use that to extract the demographics of that particular area and get more of a picture of a neighbourhood and what they're willing to spend on, you know, whether it's clothes or shopping or what have you.

It can seem quite benign, data, as we're giving it away, but it is actually used to the most benefit for businesses to see, you know, in what specials work, what specials don't work, what promotions we respond to, what stuff falls flat.

So it's a huge data pool that can extract this really useful information for businesses to see what we respond to and what we're likely to spend money on.

I think it's super, super valuable.

I think we see it with the, you know, Foodstuffs has come out with the new Loyalty Card Club Plus and it's encouraging people to join and you can't shop online without joining and you can't collect points at Pack and Save, but you can spend points there.

So they're encouraging us to swipe.

our card.

So to get all that data and form these really complete pictures of, you know, how often do you go to the supermarket?

Do you do a big shop or do you do little shops?

And then use that card to go and get a fuel, how much you're spending on fuel.

It's getting a real, really detailed picture of our household habits and what we're spending.

It is a lot of information for them to have.

And under the Privacy Act, you know, they're meant to only collect the information that they need.

They can't collect extraneous information that they're not going to do anything with.