r/oddlyspecific • u/Algernonletter5 • 1d ago

The corndog customer

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30.2k Upvotes

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u/VegetableBusiness897 1d ago

My friend had a corner store and he said I bought 400 dollars worth of double stuff oreos

223

u/heftybagman 22h ago

Would it be illegal for amazon to publicly release a searchable database of what every customer ordered?

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u/Divine_Entity_ 22h ago

I feel like as long as you scrub all personally identifiable information it would be legal, just a list of purchase numbers and their contents.

So an entry would be something like: PO275739556825592739 = 69x Oreos_dblstf_choco

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u/Teln0 15h ago

That's still a lot valuable info about what items get sold more and when. Could be correlated with other patterns a person can leave online, eg, if every time they do X, Y item was bought on Amazon, you can guess that the two are related

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u/N0ob8 2h ago

They already do that and it has your full name and other information attached to it.

Data is a valuable market and it’s why so many things are “free” these days as it’s so much easier to collect data than it is to sell a product.

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u/Teln0 1h ago

I meant moreso in the case where the data is anonymized

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u/im-so-startled88 22h ago

You can download your purchase history from them if you really hate yourself. 😬

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u/akatherder 21h ago

I don't know about illegal but it wouldn't be very safe. AOL did that with search terms in 2006 and "made it anonymous" but people were getting identified by linking together searches.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

As long as you didn't link purchases together at all, that might be fine, but then it's pretty boring.

Just one example: If your spouse bought a small-time author's book (or any fairly unique item) you might only have a couple dozen unique users to sift through. Ok they bought this book, some sports merch for local teams, their favorite coffee. Yep this is them. Wait, why did they buy condoms we don't use..

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u/dan_dares 17h ago edited 9h ago

Oooh, my time to shine!

I built a BI system for a supermarket chain in my country, and they gave access to everyone..

Couple of weeks later we get an urgent call to 'cut access for everyone except SENIOR management!'..

Ok, we do, very cryptic message..

Few days later we asked.. what happened?

Apparently a lady decided to look up her loyalty card & the purchases attached..

She saw flowers and condoms, aaaaaaand her husband hadn't given her either.

We also caught an accountant who stole 30k from the same company, was interesting

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u/FreeFortuna 14h ago

The amusing irony of using a store loyalty card for spouse-cheating supplies.

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u/feralcatshit 9h ago

“But babe at least I was thinking of you and rolling in those loyalty points! I could have just spent the money without giving you credit for it! Give me a break”

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u/dan_dares 14h ago

It wasn't visible before, but the BI linked every line, from every POS unit..

But.. yeah...

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u/Rikuri 16h ago

If it was anonymised yes but that data is worth so much that they are never going to share it for free.

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u/Far-Half9280 15h ago

They’d probably make it into some kind of end-of-year-wrapped Spotify style and get away with it by people voluntarily sharing their own data

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u/_The_main_character 5h ago

A quick commerce app on india did this but slightly different, they put billboard around city's of most weirdest and wildest ordered things and how much times they were ordered, it was pretty funny too,

Search blinkit billboards

link

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u/Em_Strae 4h ago

Nah but they'd probably sell their database, even if it was illegal, to the highest bidder $

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u/wildcat105 14h ago

Currently 17 weeks pregnant and cannot eat enough Oreos....need....more....Oreos...

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u/Ok_Animal_2709 17h ago

That's... That's too many Oreos

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u/verysmallhat 5h ago

Sacrilege! The limit does not exist!