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Add as preferred source Christo Wilson is a regular customer at Home Depot. You can reliably find him in the home improvement chain's aisles every spring, reupping his stock of perennials, shrubs, mulch and other gardening supplies to keep his extensive landscaping looking its best.
Wilson, a professor in Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences, lives in a four-person household with his wife and their two young children. But to Home Depot, Wilson is a Western European woman living with six other people. That's according to his customer data profile, a collection of personal information compiled by the company that he requested from Home Depot.
An intercollegiate cohort of researchers recently published a report showing the type of data Home Depot collects on its customers, what personal details are inferred about them and several instances in which that data is incorrect. The personal data collected by any entity, including big-box retailers like Home Depot, can affect a person's life, from how products and services are marketed to them to whether they might miss out on job notices or credit offerings, especially if the data on which their profile is based is wrong.
The report found that Home Depot, which bills itself as the "world's largest home improvement retailer," "had a lot of information you don't expect your hardware store to have about you," said David Choffnes, a professor in Khoury College and an author of the report.
"We didn't expect anything interesting to be there at all, and nonetheless found a lot of things we didn't expect," he said.
Through the data it collects, researchers found that Home Depot makes inferences about a customer's household, family, finances, education and job; collects extensive geolocation data; and creates profiles with inaccurate information, known as "junk inferences."
The findings were based on data provided to Choffnes and his team by 10 people, including Wilson, across four states. While it's a small pool of people, it helped shape a wider data collection study the cohort is currently working on, Choffnes said.
What the 10 people provided to the researchers were what are known as "Personal Information Reports" that the participants requested from Home Depot.
Those reports include information that Home Depot gathers from its website and store visits, as well as from third parties, for a range of reasons, including customer care, fraud protection, personalizing content and "learning about customer trends and interests." All this information is described on the Home Depot website , which also notes that it shares information it collects with entities like marketing and advertising partners, financial service companies, service providers and "any successor to part of our business."
The report found that none of the participants gave Home Depot information about the number of children they had, but several reports included inferences like "known child" or "likelihood of children." One participant's data report included several geolocations, many of which the participant had never visited, leading researchers to believe there was some mixing of data sources or a level of data entanglement, where information collected about a person is muddled with someone else's because of a shared location, such as an apartment complex, or the use of shared devices, like when several people use the same laptop or iPad to surf the web or make purchases.
In another example, a 20-something college student participant with a roommate was grouped with "urban-core middle-aged renters with children." Their household was also incorrectly labeled as a home business.
The data reports from eight of the 10 participants had inferences about their credit card use, education or job. Four of six participants who had job inferences said their reports were incorrect. All 10 had an online account with Home Depot, which is one way the company collects data.
"There is a whole ecosystem of data brokers whose sole business is selling data like this," Wilson, who also studied this phenomenon in 2019 and found that much of the information shared by data brokers is incorrect, told Northeastern Global News. "These [new] findings throw this whole business model into doubt. Why should businesses pay top dollar for questionable data?"
The report from the cohort of researchers from Northeastern, New York University and Columbia University also highlights that bad data can influence whether a person has access to a job or housing listing, insurance rates or credit offers. The information gathered on someone can also be used to suggest specific options to a person, "which diminishes what appears to be a freely made decision," the report said.
Among the potential harms from incorrect data is the practice of surveillance pricing, where personal data is used to influence the cost of a product or service. This month, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bipartisan issue of AI surveillance pricing, during which lawmakers emphasized their concern that consumers were on the losing side when artificial intelligence and personal data are used to adjust costs.
The report emphasized that it was not accusing Home Depot of these potential harms, but rather drawing from past research on what can happen when this type of data is collected and used.
A Home Depot spokesperson told NGN that the company "believe(s) in being good stewards of any customer information we have, and we respect our customers' privacy rights." Its customers can ask that their information be corrected or deleted and opt out of the sale or sharing of their data, the company said.
"We do not use inferences or socioeconomic data to provide discounts. We might...
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