The insurer need not collect the data, they need only buy it from the supermarket. They then use the credit card number to get the SSN and then merge the data with their own records, assigning 'bad boy' points to certain OTC meds, tobacco, and unhealthy foods. Surprise: your insurance rates go up!

The US has no meaningful data privacy laws, making data linkage inevitable. Data linkage is the combining of information from multiple databases in order to make judgements on individuals. The problem with such linkage is that quite often the conclusions drawn will be wrong.

Examples:

*If a pregnant woman buys a carton of cigarettes for her father, all an insurer would know from purchasing the data associated from her Safeway rewards card is that she bought cigarettes: the insurer would assume they were for her own use.

*A nice Catholic girl volunteers her Friday evenings working with abused women in a bad part of town. She withdraws $50 from a nearby ATM so she has pocket money for the weekend. Looking at the location of her car from the CCTV and the cash withdrawal transaction, a cop could make the assumption she was in the neighborhood to buy drugs and have probable cause to search.

People are refused employment, housing, loans and even voting rights every day based on incorrect assumptions made by data linkage programs offered-up by data miners such as ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It is to companies such as these that TSA turned to in order to implement CAPPS II and Secure Flight. TSA wanted to use data linkage to determine whether or not to grant you permission to travel in your own country. Both programs failed because of the efforts of the privacy community to expose multiple illegal data transfers from the Feds to private data miners.

Data linkage is a problem with which people are only just becoming aware. We desperately need data privacy laws along the lines of what one finds in Germany.