TARGET DEMANDS YOUR DATE OF BIRTH TO PURCHASE WINE

Just before this last Christmas, my wife was shopping in a Target store when she realized she needed a gift for an upcoming party. Since a good California wine is always acceptable, she headed for the liquor section, eventually finding what she wanted. At the checkout stand the clerk asked her for her driver’s license to confirm that she was over 21. My wife looks great and they did card her at restaurants up into her late 30’s, but the fact is she will be 65 this month and anyone with common sense would know she is over 21. Willing to show the ID, she quickly withdrew her license when the clerk indicated she was going to scan it into Target’s database. The purchase was, of course, cancelled.

We had already gone through this earlier with Safeway re. the cashing of a check. Even earlier it had been OfficeMax, who wanted to scan my wife’s driver’s license number to return an ink cartridge just because the purchase date was older than 30 days. Back in October of 2007, I did a post on Albertsons/OSCO when they sold our family’s personal data, including medication information, to the pharmaceutical industry. Their pharmacy, OSCO, also once asked me for my Social Security number for their database, which I refused as did my wife in the other incidents. But back to Target.

Since the store manager was clueless over why they had to scan the date of birth into their database saying over and over—“it’s just store policy”—my wife opted to buy the wine somewhere else, and, of course, it was my decision to tell this story to the President of Target by e-mail. I explained to him how complete the Arizona license is with identifiable info, including a picture, and that checking it should be sufficient. An afterthought, however, was that they might not trust the judgment of their clerks, but that is another complete story.

I had my answer within two hours from Joe, who wouldn’t give me his last name due to security purposes. They are worried about Joe, but not what might happen to my wife’s sensitive data once it is in their database. By the way, all that is necessary to commit identity theft is your name, address and date of birth, and I don’t have remind you how many companies had their customers’ private information raided in 2008. Some big names include: Hannaford Bros. (Eastern) Supermarket Chain, 4.2 million personal records; Countrywide Mortgage, 2 million; Starbucks 97,000. Target gets “A” for response time but “F” for policy.

Agreed, companies have to be careful who they sell booze to, but it borders on the ridiculous when the separation in the components in question—this case age—is 45 years. Rethinking my earlier statement of not trusting the clerk’s judgment, it is obvious they don’t even trust the store manager to make this decision, much less update them on the specifics of the policy.

In closing, Joe did tell me that Target only keeps the birth date after swiping the driver’s license, and that the company has a new policy under consideration in relation to this kind of incident. But added that he couldn’t guarantee quick action. Until that new policy is enacted, our family has decided to stop buying any alcoholic beverages at Target, and only other products there not available at other stores at comparable prices.

BULLETIN: CALIFORNIA STATE SENATOR WANTS TO TAKE AWAY YOUR PATIENT PRIVACY RIGHTS

California State Senator, Ron Calderon, a Democrat, has proposed legislation that will allow your local pharmacy to share and sell your confidential medical information to pharmaceutical companies and third party corporations (data brokers). Included for sale are the medications you take, and it could be done without the patient’s consent if SB. 1096 passes into law. The Consumer Federation of California in a release reports that, "Under this bill, an individual’s private medical prescriptions become commodities to be marketed and sold for the purpose of increasing corporate profit, not improving public health."

It has already been done, minus support of a law like this, in certain other states, one of which is where I live in Arizona. Albertsons/OSCO sold our family’s medication records to drug companies, who bombarded us with mailings over several months. Although these mailings stopped, the question still arises of where this private medical information, plus Social Security numbers, name/address, etc., are still warehoused. I can assure it has not been deleted from the pharmaceutical companies’ databases.

Californians should contact their representatives, and the media, to let them know how you feel. The other 49 states can only wait and see the outcome of this bill. Unfortunately, so goes California, so goes the rest of the country in many cases.

SAFEWAY CROSSES THE LINE ON PRIVACY BY DEMANDING DRIVER’S LICENSE NUMBER TO INPUT TO THEIR DATABASE

First it was Albertsons/OSCO who asked for my Social Security number to add to their corporate database, just so I could refill a prescription. I refused and they finally gave in. Soon after, an Albertsons check out clerk wanted to input my wife’s driver’s license number to the same system to cash a check for groceries and we declined and walked out with what we came for. And then Office Max said they needed to capture my wife’s driver’s license number into their database in order to honor a return, for which we had the receipt, just because it was over 30 days. Frustrated because it was a sizeable amount of money, my wife gave in because the store manager said it was Office Max policy. The same day I fired off a complaint to the retail chain’s president and learned it is not the policy of the company to do this, and that they would make that store’s management aware of their mistake. They also assured me my wife’s driver’s license number had been deleted from their system. All these three incidents were blatant attempts to acquire personal data intended for inclusion in corporate databases that are similar to those that are being compromised on a daily basis. 8.3 million private records breached already this year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center from a column in the Washington Post by Brian Krebs. No real harm done from Albertsons or Office Max so why should we worry, you might ask. I found out after researching the latest attempt to jeopardize our privacy which was when Safeway demanded my wife’s driver’s license number, once again to transfer directly into their database. Again, she declined, and the assistant store manager said he would let it go, but for this time only. What that tells me is that they don’t really need it; they just want it. Fired up once more, I went on the Internet and searched for incidents relating to Safeway and privacy, and you won’t guess what I found. Philip Scott Lyons of Tukwila, Washington was arrested for attempted arson last August, accused of setting fire to his own house while his wife and children were inside. Lyons, a firefighter himself, had used his Safeway loyalty Club Card when he bought fire starters similar to those used in the arson attempt. See story. All charges were dropped when the real culprit finally admitted to the crime, but in the meantime Lyons had been put on administrative leave for 5 months. It’s hard to tell who is the dumbest; the Police department who obviously didn’t do a thorough investigation or Safeway for giving up Lyon’s private information before they were sure their customer was a valid suspect. Lyons had to suffer through media accusations like “Firefighter Arrested For Attempted Arson,” and Fireman attempted to set fire to house, charges say,” before being completely exonerated. When you realize the whole thing happened because of the personal data that Safeway was collecting on Lyons, and compounded by the fact that, if he had had control over it, the whole episode could have been prevented.

NOW MICROSOFT WANTS YOUR PERSONAL HEALTH RECORDS

Microsoft’s new HealthVault is not such a bad idea if it didn’t portend yet another increase in the collection and selling of your sensitive data. I am not even implying that is what Microsoft has in mind, but the sale of medical related information is already big business in the junk mail industry. There are 1,403 “medical related” lists on the market representing every ailment from Alzheimers to ulcers, and each medication you take from Advil to Zoloft. There’s a new list on the market called MedTrackAlert Ailment eNewsletter where 500 thousand online consumers signed up for this free newsletter and asked for information on various health subjects, and now their names and e-mail and postal addresses are for sale. A physician does make his case for the HealthVault approach to accessible medical data: for doctors, as a patient, and if you provide health care for a family member. See article. That’s a good thing, but it never seems to stop there. First of all, the loss of your medical records by the institutions that hold them is running at a record pace. The VA breach of 26.5 million records, Ohio U., 60,000 student records, UCLA, over 800,000 records, and the list goes on. When you Google “medical data breaches” you get 234,000 hits. Second, the minute a new piece of consumer information is collected by most organizations, there is that immediate-impulse- mentality to get it ready to sell. This is demonstrated by a total of over 50,000 junk mail lists on the market, more specifically the 1,403 devoted to medical data. And there is also the alleged sale by the Albertsons food and drug chain of customer names and prescription data to pharmaceutical companies in 2004, which resulted in a lawsuit filed against the chain by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. MS says of HealthVault, “The personal information will be stored in a secure encrypted database.” From a New York Times article. The question is, what level of encryption, and is it secure enough to ward off hackers. The TJX (TJ Maxx, Marshalls, etc. retail stores) customer credit card data was also encrypted, but at a level that allowed the crooks to steal it easily with a directional antenna while cruising the retail store’s parking lot. MS also says it isn’t expecting much information from the individual, but hopes the individual will grant permission for its release from doctors and hospitals. I haven’t signed up yet, which I plan to do just to find out the parameters of the program, but I did get some specifics from the initial stages of this process. They are: You control your HealthVault; You decide what information goes in or out of your record; MS won’t use your “health information for commercial purposes unless (they) ask and you say clearly that (they) may.” And there lies the problem, in that the complexity in any approval of the use of your name and personal data by an outside source can be confusing. It is hard to understand and digest on the spot, which is the position you are in when signing-on, or even eventually when you are contacted for approval. Trust me…data collectors always get what they want, and that is the reason we are in the identity crisis that exists today.

More on this later.

STONEWALLED BY AARP WHEN THEY TAKE SAME ROAD AS ALBERTSONS/OSCO AND DOMINICK’S

Back in April of 2006, I signed up for the American Assn. of Retired Persons (AARP) prescription plan made available through the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA). By April 12, 2006, I had received a mailing from Walgreens soliciting my business and offering help with my Medicare Prescription Drug Program. The mailing was disguised with an address to “The Dunning Household” but there was no doubt in my mind where Walgreens got my name. It had to be from my signing up with Medicare because nothing else had changed. I contacted AARP in May of 2006 to ask why, without permission, my name had been given to Walgreens. In a series of e-mail replies, I was recommended to a general number at United Health Care who administers the program for AARP. When calling this number, the person answering had no idea what I was talking about, and referred me to another number where I left a message that was never returned. Back to AARP where I asked for a direct contact at United Health Care, which they refused to give me, referring me back to the useless number, eventually blowing me off with “I am sorry but I do not have further information.” I have been an AARP member for over 25 years and, needless to say, I was shocked when this organization refused to provide assistance in my concern over the privacy of my personal data. United Health Care finally sent me their “Notice of Privacy Practices” in November of 2006 which you can read here, and, considering the number of ways they disclose your information, probably explains how Walgreens got my name. By the way, I received another Walgreens mailing still soliciting my prescription business in January of 2006, this time addressed to “The Dunning Family.” And then in June of 2007, AARP automatically signed me up for their “RX Prescription Solutions” program, also administered by United Healthcare, with an opt-out date that was impossible for me to meet. It said I could cancel later which I decided to do, primarily so I could monitor the activity using my private information. I was deluged with mail touting everything from an upgrade in the Medicare prescription program to trying to sell me drugs by junk mail. One particular mailing included six medications I currently take or have taken, indicating how AARP/United Health Care could save me money buying through them. I decided to cancel RX Prescription Solutions. If you are having similar problems, or have an opinion on this issue, contact AARP and tell them how you feel. OK. So what’s all the hullabaloo for if this is only about unwanted junk mail? The problem, of course, isn’t receiving the mail, it is the database that was created with my personal data, including health information, that concerns me. Even when I cancelled the program, they still retained my sensitive data, just moving it to another inactive database they will eventually use to try and sign me up again in the future. And this isn’t over-reaction because in my 35 years as a junk mail data broker, I have witnessed thousands of databases like this one created, and most of them are still around in the archives, some with minimum security, and could provide the next avenue for attack by the ID crooks.

LET’S RETURN TO THE FAMILY PHARMACY WHERE YOUR PERSONAL MEDICAL DATA WAS STILL YOURS

In yesterday’s post I took Albertsons/OSCO to task for starting another program to collect you private medical data, and manipulate it for their benefit. In the company’s mailing to my wife, she wasn’t even given the option to say whether she wanted to join. She was in, and if she wanted out she had to call Albertsons. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) is concerned, as you can see by the “Alert” posted on their site. I urge you to read this article from PRC, because it confirms everything I reported on Albertsons/OSCO in Monday’s post. Like proceeding with programs (NextStep Prescription Support) that involve prescription information compiled in an easily retrieved database, without the customer’s permission. By the way, your doctor has no idea they are doing this. And now Dominick’s, a food and drug chain in the Midwest owned by Safeway, is mailing out letters similar to those I reported Albertsons was sending in 2005 and early 2007; see here and here. It all sounds so mysterious. Out of the blue you receive this notification from your local pharmacist that your prescription for “X” may be overdue, but you should ignore this communiqué if your doctor has changed your prescription or has given you other instructions. In other words, the sender doesn’t have the slightest idea what your specific situation is, but if at all possible, they want their Rx for “X” renewed. Older folk might be confused by this approach into thinking they may not be taking their medicine properly and make critical mistakes. After all, it comes from their trusted pharmacist, who, for many of us, represents a very important second line of health information and communications. It is just one more example of how our names and personal data are used to sell us something, or be sold for huge profits by the junk mail and non-junk mail industries. In my concept of control over consumers’ names and private information, the pharmaceutical business would be at the top of the non-junk mail list, along with all the other similar companies who have recently decided that collecting and selling your sensitive data is a new-found treasure of revenue. It is only a matter of time until pharmaceutical corporations start to perform data mining/predictive modeling in a serious fashion to determine who they can coerce into switching medications. That is, if they aren’t already doing it secretly. With all the consumer information out there on ailments suffered and prescriptions taken, then combining this with demographic data like age, income, occupation, etc., compounded further with lifestyle habits like drinking, smoking, gambling and the like…the individual doesn’t have a fighting chance. Especially should these databases be used in the hiring of employees, determining insurance eligibility, and for securing home mortgages or other types of credit. Think they won’t do it? Innocent Americans didn’t think their own President would spy on their phone calls either.

Tomorrow: AARP tries the same negative-option approach as Albertsons and Dominick”s.

ALBERTSONS IS AT IT AGAIN…WITH YOUR PRIVATE MEDICAL INFORMATION

Just when you thought you could go back to the Albertsons/OSCO pharmacy without worrying about your personal data, they start yet another program that will document all medical-related activity at your friendly OSCO pharmacist. I called mine, the pharmacy manager, to raise hell, and he didn’t even know about the program called “NextStep Prescription Support.” My wife wasn’t given a choice of joining; she’s in the program unless she takes the time to call them and cancel. It’s called “negative option” in junk mail, and one of the most devious methods used to acquire customers. I did three posts on Albertsons/OSCO starting in October of 2005 (See one, two, three) about requests for my Social Security number, and mine and my wife’s driver’s license numbers for their database, and also mailings we were receiving then with private information about our medications. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) filed a lawsuit in September of 2004, charging Albertsons and its drug chain subsidiaries OSCO, SavOn, and Jewel-OSCO, with “violating the privacy rights of thousands of its customers by illegally using their confidential prescription information to conduct targeted marketing campaigns on behalf of drug companies.” In a direct quote from the PRC action, “The complaint alleges that Albertsons’ pharmacy customers receive direct mail and phone solicitations derived from confidential customer medical information provided to the pharmacy solely to fill prescriptions. The solicitations look like they are from the patient’s concerned local pharmacist and remind the customer to renew a prescription or consider an alternative medication. But they are actually generated for pharmaceutical company’s sales purposes by a specially-designed marketing database, sold by Albertsons. The phone calls customers receive are intended to more urgently communicate the same message. Written authorization from the customer is not first provided as legally required.” So you ask why we are still dealing with Albertsons/OSCO if they are into so many of these shenanigans. Because someone has to keep an eye on them, and I am also working on another story about the pharmaceutical industry that I know I can depend on Albertsons for a major contribution, based on their track record. According to the letter we received—displayed at the beginning of this post—the NextStep Prescription Support Program comes by financial support from Proctor & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, and Sanofi-aventis, neither of which get to see your “personal information,” Albertsons professes at the end. There have been changes at Albertsons Inc. out of Boise, ID in the past couple of years, in the sale of some 661 Albertsons stores around the country to investor group, Cerberus Capital Management, LP, with headquarters in New York. It is from this organization that my wife’s letter was received. The new Albertsons LLC will be headed up by Robert Miller, who exclaims that now that they are smaller, they can better deal with things at the local level and “have a more targeted focus on what is right for the customer and be able to make those decisions much more quickly and closer to them.” In the case of the NextStep Prescription Support Program, he’d better rethink that decision.

Tomorrow: More on "Pharmacies Profiting at Your Expense."

PFIZER ASKS CONSUMERS PERSONAL QUESTIONS WHILE LOSING EMPLOYEE PERSONAL DATA
In a recent edition of Reader’s Digest, there is a mail-in form asking readers to identify their kind of pain, and list the medication they are taking for it. You also must provide your name, address, age and gender. Phone and e-mail address are optional. You send it to Pfizer in a fold-over style mailer with minimum security, and it promptly goes into their database of consumer private information. For this data, they offer information about pain and Pfizer products for your ailments. There are two more boxes to check: one, asking you to agree to allow them to share this info around and outside the company; two, they want to call you and ask questions. My advice: if you have pain, call a doctor; don’t tell Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company about it. As an example, Pfizer just reported the loss of personal information on 17,000—still not sure other data hasn’t been compromised—including name, address, and Social Security number, which was posted on the Internet. It isn’t clear, but the company thinks another less-than-bright employee took a laptop home, and the spouse may have tried to install file-sharing software, after which the private data was made available over a “peer-to-peer” network, according to The Day.com. As best I can determine, P to P networks are simply multiple computers tied together, like a husband and wife at home, so I am not certain how the sensitive data ended up on the Internet, and Pfizer refuses to answer specific questions re. the incident. A few years back Privacy Rights clearinghouse filed a lawsuit against Albertsons/OSCO for collecting your prescription data and selling it to pharmaceutical companies. CVS did the same in 1998, resulting in a lawsuit again the outside data company, Elensys, and Eli Lilly “outed” 669 Prozac users through a broadcast e-mail listing all recipients in the “To” line. I believe most of us would agree that the last industry we want in the personal data business is the pharmaceutical companies.

THE BREACH BAND JUST PLAYS ON AND ON

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) just reported 100,000 employee records including Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information missing from a controlled area. It was on a hard drive at TSA headquarters, and the agency doesn’t even know if it was stolen, or still somewhere within the premises, according to an article on MSNBC. TSA is a division of the Homeland Security Department, and is responsible for the security of our transportation systems. The question you should all be asking is, just how far down the line does the incompetence go? I’m getting on a plane with my wife in the near future, and this doesn’t give me a warm feeling about our safety. But this same band has been playing the same tune since the ChoicePoint incident of February, 2005, and it does not look like there’s any chance of the music stopping. Since last checking the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Chronology of Data Breaches on April 12, there have been 17 new breaches with the loss of 242,264 personal records. Some of the newest breachers are companies you’ve heard of, like Caterpillar, Google Ads, Neiman Marcus, Albertsons and the Dept. of U.S. Agriculture. There were also a number of educational institutions losing sensitive data. Like a broken record, the only way to stop this is for consumers to take control over their names and private information, and at the same time you should be compensated when it is sold. Let Congress know what you think: House of Representatives; Senate.

OSCO PHARMACY (ALBERTSONS) RESUMES PRESCRIPTION MAILINGS

After a hiatus in 2006, our OSCO pharmacy has once again started to mail reminders to refill certain medications we purchase from them. I mention this because of a privacy incident with this pharmacist a few years ago, and the fact that, in September, 2004, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) filed a lawsuit against Albertsons for improperly using and disclosing a consumer's private and confidential medical information for purposes other than just filling prescriptions. My episode with the OSCO pharmacist involved a cavalier attitude over the safety of my Social Security number in their database, and another occasion where the checkout clerk wanted to input family personal data into Albertsons computer. The PRC case claims Albertsons was paid from $3 to $4.50 per letter it sends by the pharmaceutical companies, $12 to $15 for each phone inquiry, allegedly collecting millions annually from your private medical data. I personally confronted our Albertsons store manager about their handling of this sensitive data. To begin with, he said, he would have to contact corporate and call me back. He never did.

Drugs, Data and Money

By now, if you have been following my blog, you know that data, particularly personal data, is the Fort Knox of the technological age. If I were a greedy entrepreneur, I would much rather have a database containing several million names with private information, than a row of hotels on Boardwalk. CNN confirms this in their recent article, “Your identity…for sale,” by Jeanne Sahadi.

She covers the regular data breaches by the big companies, banks and data brokers, but her heading, Retailers and manufacturers, is what caught my attention. Under this she says: “From Mom-and-Pop shops to nationwide drug stores and supermarkets to the manufacturer of your coffeemaker, there’s information companies collect on you and may sell to information brokers.” Forget “may.” I can confirm that they do.

Rumors of the sale of consumers’ medical info have been floated for the last few years but Privacy Rights Clearinghouse made it official in 2004, by filing a lawsuit against Albertsons supermarket chain and their drug subsidiaries, OSCO and SAV-ON. PRC makes the claim that, “Albertsons secretly enters into commercial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies willing to pay to participate in Albertsons’ Drug Marketing Program, which is based on the information taken from customer prescriptions.”

And, get this folks, according to PRC: “Albertsons is paid at least $3.00 - $4.50 per letter it sends and between $12-15 for each phone inquiry.” At its best, this is thirty times better than the average 15 cents per name made by the junk mail industry.

According to Food Marketing Institute, the average supermarket has approximately 14,000 customers each week, 700,000 a year. If only one-third of them buy their medication there, that’s a potential annual sale of medical data, per store, of $699,300. Albertsons has 2,300 stores, but let’s say only half have drug departments. The grand total each mailing is over $800 million. And this doesn’t even include the payments for those phone inquiries.

I did a BLOG Bulletin recently on why Albertsons/OSCO wants your personal data. In this particular instance, their check-out clerks were asking for personal information to cash checks and actually in-putting it to their database from the cash register. I raised hell—as probably did many other customers—and they stopped it soon after that incident. Who knows how many driver’s license numbers and telephone numbers—all that’s necessary, along with name and address, to initiate ID theft—they collected before they canceled the policy.

The reason all this is so hush-hush is due to the enormous lobbying efforts of the pharmaceutical industry. The Center for Public Integrity published an article on their Web site recently, “Drug Lobby Second to None,” by Asif Ismail. He starts by revealing that, according to the Center, drug lobbyists spent over “…$800 million in federal lobbying and campaign donations at the federal and state levels in the past seven years…” He goes on to point out how even the direction of the FDA has become more “industry-friendly.”

Although somewhat dated (2001), Andrew Brandt’s Privacy Watch article, “A handful of insurance and medical industry companies want to sell your personal data, but you can stop them,” in PC World, was a forecast of things to come. He singles out insurance companies and the medical industry, both of which, he states, want to get in the business of selling your name and personal data. At the time, the Bush administration was trying to delay the stringent new privacy rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

If you’ve been to the doctor’s office recently, you know that at least we have the HIPAA on our side now. More on this whole issue in a future post.

BLOG Bulletin: Super Market and Drug Chain Albertsons/Osco Wants Your Personal Data. The Question is: WHY?

We’ve been shopping at the Albertsons/Osco store in Scottsdale, AZ, since it first opened several years ago. Even joined their “Preferred Savings Card” plan for store discounts. I should know better but the call of the bargain never fails. We also purchase all our prescriptions from Osco for my wife, her father and myself. A lot of money is spent each week in this store by the Dunning family.

I tell you this as the prelude to an unbelievable series of anti-consumer policies that this major grocery and drug retailer has initiated. From our family’s point of view it started a few years ago when a pharmaceutical clerk asked me for my Social Security number. He said Albertsons new policy was to have this on file but he didn’t know why. I said there was no way this was going to happen and a heated argument ensued. At this point the pharmacy manager stepped in and agreed to use a substitute number.

It was about the same time that we began to receive mailings, supposedly from Osco, with a reminder for prescription renewals. This contained the name of the drug, Rx#, refill due-date, and the address and telephone number of the store location. To date, we have received forty-seven mailings and there is no indication they will ever stop. However, if Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), one of the nation’s largest privacy organizations has their way, there will come a halt soon.

PRC filed suit against Albertsons and its Osco/SavOn pharmacies in September 2004, charging them with improperly using and disclosing your private and confidential medical information. The action also asks restitution for amounts paid Albertsons for this data. It has been alleged for some time now that drug chains across the country were selling these records to the pharmaceutical companies. In my earlier posts, I told you how the junk mailers were amassing a fortune selling your name and personal data for $4 billion each year. If the figures were known, the sale of your medical information could very well top that.

Not satisfied, Albertsons recently implemented their latest jab at the consumer. They are requiring you to present your driver license and provide your telephone number to cash checks. Normally that’s OK, except, they input both the license number and telephone number into their computer. At the airport, TSA requires the same picture ID to get on a plane but they don’t whisk it away to their computer. I don’t mind showing it but react postally to Albertsons saving it in a database. Thus, the original question: why do they want your personal data?

I asked the store manager but he didn’t know. He said he would contact Albertsons corporate and get back to me in a couple of days. That was over a week ago…and nothing. Interestingly, a checkout clerk who disagrees with the new policy said management told them they would be required to ask for the ID’s ten times for each person. Yep, each time keying it in to the computer. The same clerk said they heard it was because Albertsons was changing check authorization companies to save money.

I am curious if anyone out there in the blogosphere has experienced the same treatment. If you have, your comments would be welcomed on this post. Also, you might want to contact Albertsons and tell them how you feel about their privacy policies. One at a time…we’ll let all the “Albertsons” know that they cannot compromise our names and personal data.