You know those "rewards" cards?

We all know (or at least should know) that these rewards cards that are given out by any and every retail store these days are used by their marketing departments to create really rich data.  As this post illustrates this data is very important especially now, where the average customer (is there an average customer anymore?) shops multiple channels (brick and mortar, online, phone, mobile), so what these cards allow is to attach more demographic information to the actual sale as well allow for aggregation across channels.

Read about it here: Retail and BI

Again this data is very rich, but needs to be used very carefully.  Yes, you now know that the mother of a 10 year old likes to buy jeans at Old Navy, but you do not need tell them that.  It is a very slippery slope between good direct marketing and "big brother" looking into your home and wallet.