It’s not the year 2050 and it’s not a dystopian science fiction or music video (youtube) from 1985, but reality. The Norwegian statistics office SSB wants to oblige the largest operator of card payment terminals, Nets, to provide it with all the data on payments processed through the terminals. They include names, addresses, purchase dates and prices of the individual products.
In addition, the four largest grocery chains are to be obliged to hand over the cash register receipts to the government statisticians, which show which products the respective citizens have bought.
Peter Imanuelsen, who lives in Norway, first wrote about it in English on 2 June. I could not find another report. I could not believe it. So, with the help of a translate.com, I made a translation of the statistical authority’s cost and benefit estimate, which explains what they are planning and what it is supposed to be good for.
And it is indeed true. Imanuelsen’s report is not exaggerated.
Nets terminals handle 80% of digital payments in Norwegian supermarkets. The statisticians want to collect, combine, archive and analyse millions of receipts every day and over a billion payment transactions every year.
The statisticians are aware that the project is very invasive of Norwegians’ privacy, but they say it is only for statistical purposes and that the statisticians are trustworthy and used to handling sensitive data securely. And that the law forbids using the data for any other purpose than statistical. This is supposed to gives citizen the guarantee that this will not happen. (At least until the relevant laws are changed.)
However, the statisticians do not mention anything about a deletion of the data at some point, which makes a Norwegian media report credible that the data will be saved permanently. Data security measures are only described in very general terms. There is no explicit mention of a requirement that the data must not be hosted or processed by American companies, because otherwise, according to CLOUD law, the secret services of the USA would have access to it. The idea is not outlandish, as the German Federal Statistical Office is hosting the 2022 census data at Cloudflare, a US company.
The government wants to know who eats and drinks what…
One of the main stated purposes for this frightening form of data collection is that statisticians want to know better what foods and drinks citizens are consuming. And not just overall, but broken down finely. This way, the state can better assess how healthy or unhealthy its citizens eat and determine which groups it needs to work on if it wants to improve eating habits. Because it is so hard to believe, here is a longer quote from the statisticians’ cost-benefit analysis:
“Statistic Norway will develop and publish new official statistics on the diet of the Norwegian population based on new data sources. (…) The statistics will have a much higher quality and level of detail than before through access to transaction data from Nets in combination with, among other things, receipt data from grocery chains, data on the nutritional content of food and household data from Statistics Norway’s administrative register.
This applies, for example, to statistics showing how the diet of the Norwegian population varies with socio-economic background factors such as income, education and labour market affiliation, and how it varies with demographic and geographical dimensions. It is important to show regional, demographic and social differences in diet, as this is a key dimension in measuring and quantifying the lifestyle habits of the population.
Overall, the statistics will contribute to a much better knowledge base about developments in Norwegian diets, with a higher quality and level of detail than before. This is also in line with what is reflected in the health authorities’ action plans and in a memorandum of understanding between the health authorities and the food industry on healthier diets.”
…and who goes to which doctor and psychiatrist
Continue reading here
Besides the political fight against efforts of this kind and those who push them forward, paying in cash is the most important form of resistance. It will soon be the only way for Norwegians to preserve some privacy.
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