Showing the Receipts

You may not be keeping the receipts on your retail purchases, but retailers are definitely keeping the receipts on you. Journalists have requested the dossier McDonald’s has on them, and the reports have come back at over 500 pages (more if you wanted fries with that). You may be able to hide that trip to the donut shop from your family, but you aren’t going to be able to hide it from the host of retailers collecting, sharing, marketing and selling your information. It’s enough to make your eyes glaze over. As Christian Schneider explains in the WSJ (Gift Article): You’re in a Toxic Relationship With Your Retailers. “With every purchase, you are entering into a lifelong relationship with a needy lover who is never willing to set you free. Every product you buy is added to your curriculum vitae.” This is hardly a new story. So why focus on it now? Because we are moving into an era where people are starting to use AI agents (or computerized personal assistants) to take over many tasks, including making purchases. What the most sophisticated data brokers have collected about you is nothing compared to the amount of personal, financial, and behavioral information people are willingly handing over because, apparently, shopping online and having items delivered directly to your doorstep seems too hard. And if you’re sharing your contact list with your agent, you’re probably sharing some of my data, too. All this personal information is being surrendered without a fight to the very companies that have shown us, time and time again, that they will take as much of our data as they can and use it against us if it means increasing shareholder value. Definitely something to muse on. Or if that seems like too much work, maybe you can have Muse muse on it for you. It probably already knows you’re musing anyway. Even if you’ve surrendered, there’s still an ongoing fight between retailers and agentic AI companies. “Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others have all introduced some version of agentic shopping tools that promise to make buying things even easier than it already is. Demos show AI agents that can seamlessly book flights and hotels, browse billions of products to find the right one, and secure tickets to sporting events on a human’s behalf. But as AI companies — and their users — are finding out, buying things requires that the other party is willing to sell them in the first place.” The Verge (Gift Article): AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary. Maybe you should be wary, too. After all, ultimately, you’re the product. There’s an ongoing battle to see which companies get to own you. Don’t sell yourself for nothing.