Redding groceries including Walmart are tracking you. Here's what they found out about me.

When you go grocery shopping, there's something more valuable to your grocer than the money you spend.

It's you.

Each time you use that loyalty card or grocery app, grocers get valuable insight into your spending habits and product preferences.

They glean information about your education level, income, number of children or pets in the household. Some grocers take it a step further and track demographic data such as gender, ethnicity, and race, with purchase history. And that "first-party data" helps grocers not only better understand their customer, but make a big profit.

While this data is collected for research purposes, business analytics, marketing, and advertising, it can be sold to other data brokers or advertising technology companies.

It's helped grocers like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons set up their own data-collection firms, known as retail media networks. A report by Boston Consulting Group, projects that the retail media market will grow by 25% per year to $100 billion over the next five years.

So few of us carefully read the small text outlining an app's or loyalty card's terms, you might not even know that you've consented to them.

According to Pew Research survey about privacy, while Americans worry about digital privacy, they acknowledge not always paying attention to privacy policies and terms of service. In their survey, only 9% of Americans said they always read a company’s privacy policy before agreeing to it and 13% of Americans said they often read it. About 36% said they never read a company’s privacy policy before agreeing to it.

A company's privacy policy or terms and conditions are not obscured. You may have agreed right when you signed up for an account and were asked to check a box to proceed. In some cases, simply continuing to create an account automatically means consenting to the privacy policy and terms and conditions.

Tracking may seem invasive, and creepy, but not new. In the digital age, every social media post, Google search, or move around town is tracked.

Tracking you to profit the retail media network

Before online apps, grocers and retailers offered customers membership programs to better understand them and match them with what they want, said Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, managing director of International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Data firm Apptopia found that more consumers used grocery store apps for coupons as inflation hiked up food prices. App usage was up 77% in May 2022 and the search for the word “coupon” was up by 75% in April 2022.

With more consumers using apps, companies can track activity offline and online. Finding how a customer’s online activity translates to the real world is the “holy grail” for retailers, Zweifel-Keegan said.

And that tracking can go beyond an app.

Zweifel-Keegan points to Bluetooth beacon technology that can push advertisements to a shopper's phone and track customer movements inside the store. Whether a phone has Bluetooth on or off, it is always “sniffing” for other Bluetooth devices around it. And if stores want, they can add Bluetooth beacon devices around their stores to track how a customer travels within the store and aisles they spend time on.

“Outside of the purchases you’re making, they might be able to develop information about your behavior in the store itself,” Zweifel-Keegan said.

Stores like Target and Macy’s have already incorporated Bluetooth beacons to help customers find items in their store or take advantage of sales.

It’s an opportunity for grocery stores, too.

Walmart Connect is Walmart’s advertising arm that integrates online and in-store customer behavior, helping businesses and brands tap into the large database of Walmart customers. According to their 2022 earnings release, it brought in $2.7 billion.

For Kroger, their wholly owned subsidiary 84.51° collects first-party data from 62 million American households to operate loyalty programs, promotions, advertise, and conduct consumer research. They also power Kroger Precision Marketing allowing suppliers to connect with Kroger customers, and brought in $1.2 in operating profit last year, according to their 2022 earnings call.

Kroger is in talks to merge with Albertsons, which launched its own retail media company in November 2021, Albertsons Media Collective.

Curious about how supermarkets were using my data, I decided to request it from two stores − Food Lion, owned by Ahold Delhaize in Netherlands, and Foods Co., which is owned by Kroger.

My Kroger data

I began shopping at Foods Co. In August 2022. Because I don't shop there often, I didn't expect a lot in return.

But Kroger collects a hefty amount of information on customers. According to Kroger’s Privacy Policy, they collect some of the obvious − contact, payment information, unique identifiers for advertising, in some cases your driver’s license to verify age for restricted purchases, loyalty account information like purchases, coupons, savings, fuel points and advertising preferences.

But here is where it gets too close for my comfort. They track demographic information like age, marital or family status, whether there are children in the household, languages, education, gender, ethnicity, race, employment information, geolocation, and if a user consents, precise geolocation.

They track your website and app interactions too — IP address, device identifiers, browser, time zone, device characteristics, browsing data, and how you interacted with a Kroger ad.

Data collection also extends to sensory data like CCTV recordings from their facilities or premises, and some locations collect biometric information like facial recognition data for security purposes.

Contacting customer service? They'll record your voice. They also collect health-related information tied to their pharmacy, shopping, or if you're injured in their store.

For my data, which spanned 31 pages of text, Kroger tracked the number of times I logged in to the app, when I changed the password, preferred store and the coupons I clipped. In the Foods Co. app, I get personalized coupons like fuel rewards and savings based on my shopping.

Foods Co. tracked each purchase − total purchase history, each product's cost, discount, dollars spent at their gas station, whether I paid with credit, debit or cash, in-store or online, and the times and dates the purchases were made.

My 'Humble beginnings' with Food Lion

According to Food Lion’s Privacy Statement, like Kroger they collected payment, preferred store, purchase history, geolocation, and interaction with customer support.

If you interact with them on social media, they collect your name, profile picture, social media handles, email address, gender, age group, networks, friends list, language, birthday, education, work history, interest and likes.

Through the website and emails, Food Lion will automatically collect cookies to uniquely identify the browser, and web beacons to transmit cookie information to a web server.

They will also collect equipment and other behavioral and technical data attributes, like browsing, navigation and other actions and usage patterns on the sites, device IP address, unique device identifier, web browser characteristics, device characteristics, battery and signal strength, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, and dates and times of website visits.

Using the store’s wireless internet? The company will capture the device identifier and connection data, which may include signal strength, quality, and duration of connection. Through a third-party app called Glassbox, they will record user interaction with the grocery website and app including users’ clicks, mouse movements and scrolls.

Food Lion collected a lot on me.

According to my 128 trips to the store in Charlottesville, Virginia, the data determined I was a household size of one with three children between the ages of 10 and 18 and no pets.

In fact, my family makeup includes me, my spouse, a dog and a newborn baby.

Food Lion also tracked website interactions down to the number of website visits, minutes spent, coupons clipped, and items added to our cart.

It scored our engagement with about 70 product categories like "carbohydrate density products", "good fat products", vegetarian and Weight Watchers products.

But then there was a label — called a Mosaic Household Description — “Humble Beginnings,”

It comes from a 2018 Experian e-handbook I found online and classifies American consumers into different categories. Experian told me that it's a market segmentation tool that assigns market clusters to all households within a geography based on broad lifestyle characteristics. These cluster segments are built using “pseudonymized and aggregated data with no information associated about individual consumers or households shared with any organization.”

People who fall under “Humble Beginnings” are described as “among the nation’s least affluent, striving to make ends meet.” They are singles and single-parent households with modest incomes in city apartments, have incomes half the national average, a below-average education and raising children on a tight budget while working low-level service sector jobs.

That’s a lot to assume based on my purchases.

Is inaccurate data stereotyping us?

Looking further into the "Humble Beginnings" category, these families don’t have an active lifestyle, travel little, but go out for the occasional movie, bingo game, or take their kids to free activities at the park.

“These families spend a lot of free time at home, where they listen to Latin music and watch Spanish TV stations,” the guide states.

That doesn't describe me at all.

Was I being stereotyped? What does my pasta, bread or condiment preference have to do with liking bingo? I don’t like bingo.

Food Lion didn’t respond to my request to go over this data. Multiple emails sent to Peapod Digital Labs, the retail media arm of Ahold Delhaize, were also not answered.

Paul Bowers, a technical writer from Charleston, South Carolina, also found his Food Lion data to be inaccurate.

In May, he wrote a piece titled “Big Grocery is watching me,” and detailed the inaccuracies − he was categorized as female, with no children, and an estimated income less than $15,000.

“There was a lot of it that was way off,” Bowers said. “I don’t know where it was getting these intuitions about us.”

Despite inaccuracies, grocers are going to gather data. Zweifel-Keegan said advertising and retail media networks "have a sense for the value of the household insights."

“Whether or not those are perfectly accurate, the people are there to buy those eyeballs and make the most use out of their advertising dollars,” he said.

But the stereotyping felt odd. Bowers said if companies are going to make unfair assumptions, people should know how they’re being talked about behind their backs. A company knowing too much can feel invasive, but when they get it wrong, he wondered if it’s worth fixing.

“Sometimes it’s a blow to the ego,” Bowers said with a laugh. And the data didn’t strike him as scientific at all.

Bowers and I do take solace in one thing – the companies might not know everything about us.

And in some way, that is just fine.

Amritpal Kaur Sandhu-Longoria reports for USA TODAY’s Money team.

This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Why Redding grocers like Walmart are collecting your shopping data.