BBC NEWS | Business | Has Nectar played its cards right?
This is an article looing at Nectar's success at signing up customers. Loyalty cards are very widespread in the UK and Nectar is the biggest of the lot. I think a lot of consumers don't really understand that the companies using these are constantly anaylsing data about you to attempt to profile who you are and your buying behaviour.
While companies don't acknowledge it, this data could be used for just about anything despite data protection, because basically you sign up to allowing your data to be used in that way.
Strangely while I have a natural aversion to invasion of my privacy in this way and do not like the idea of people knowing about what I am up to (naturally paranoid I suppose) I am quite happy to share information with a firm like Amazon, who use such data to provide a recommendation service. Perhaps it is because I explicitly know what the data is being used for (or I have that perception at least) and in giving that data I have a need fulfilled (books I might be interested in promoted to me).
Loyalty cards while giving discounts, do not give me a warm fuzzy feeling because I don't know exactly what they are using the data for and even though I would get the discount, from past experience it just isn't worth it. Perhaps if they told me what they were doing and recommended specific products I might just bite?