Big Brutha

You knew this was coming, right? I mean surely you understood that becoming a member of the "Grocery Store" club and saving five cents on your Odwalla drinks had a down side, right?

Okay you knew they were compiling dta about what, when, how much, how often you bought Brand X, right?

Good then it will coma as no wsurprise that the government just used that data to find offending salmonella products.  Indeed one goverment worker proclaimed.....

Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile.
"It was really exciting. It was a break in the investigation for sure," CDC epidemiologist Casey Barton Behravesh said.

Exciting eh?  Mountain of data, eh? But, I am sure it is safe.  How do I know?  Why the bureaucrat told us!

J. Kathryn MacDonald, an epidemiologist with the Washington state Health Department who worked on the salmonella outbreak, such some advocates' privacy fears are unfounded.
"This is not being used as a tool for open-ended trawling through many records hoping to find something," MacDonald said. "The records are treated with the same level of confidentiality as would medical records." 

But of course........