They’re interested in your hobbies, and what that says about you and the kinds of things you and your family might get.
And the larger theme is not just that it’ll affect what you buy. My overarching argument is that it is training people to accept this kind of attitude in every aspect of our lives, for every kind of institution. Once we get used to the idea of doing this in the store, we’ll get used to the idea of doing it everywhere. It is a training ground. It is what I call the “hidden curriculum.” That’s the hidden curriculum of the retail business: to get people used to the idea of giving up their data for the purposes of relevance and tradeoffs and all that.
At the same time, I argue, while all these fights are going on in Washington about marketing and the NSA and advertising, on a day-to-day basis, people are learning to give up this data as a logical, natural part of life, in their everyday shopping.
So if it happens that I go into the Global Entry office and they say, “How about this?” I say, “Well, yeah, I’ve done that before!” I get used to the idea, and it becomes second nature to think about giving up data.