Criminals have a right to low prices too!

Back to the issue of privacy and the grocery discount cards that we talked about earlier in the semester. So, on Tuesday, April Fools Day, my roommate mentioned to me how someone saran wrapped his car. This is simply when someone takes a role or more of saran wrap and covers an entire car with it so doors can't be opened, and windows can't be seen out without removing it. I later noticed the evidence in our parking lot later that day. Anyway, it was a pretty harmless prank, and he wasn't really angry, but regardless, he wanted to find out who did it. Whoever it was had left the used rolls, boxes, and Kroger grocery bag on the ground near my roommate's car. I guess when my roommate picked up all the trash and was getting ready to throw it away he noticed the receipt was still in the grocery bag from Kroger. Apparently the receipt also displayed the Kroger card number used to save the assailant a few extra cents on the saran wrap. In what I thought to be a quite resourceful move, my roommate called Kroger and asked if they could tell him the owner of the card number. Unfortunately, Kroger said that in order to release that information they needed a police subpoena, of which my roommate obviously did not have.

Anyway, this just made me question the whole privacy issue concerning businesses and what they do with your personal information once again. While Kroger did keep the saran wrapper's identity private, it's still questionable in my mind that a consumer's actions can be logged and traced at the will of businesses and the authorities. Perhaps it serves a legal purpose and is actually a good thing, allowing the police one more method to track down criminals.

On the other hand, even though they held the information from my roommate, can these stores always be trusted to keep our information private? I would imagine that our privacy cannot always be guaranteed by these businesses.