Stealth-mode shopping is best cyber safeguard

‘YOUR name, sir?” the nice young man in the sports store asked. “It’s Nathan … um … Johnson,” I said. “Nathan Johnson,” he replied, deadpan but with an almost imperceptible raise of one eyebrow, a clear tell he didn’t believe me.

“That is correct,” I said, feeling my two kids watching me with a mixture of mirth and confusion.

“And your email?” “It’s, um, nathan.johnson@gmail.com,” I replied, leaning in to my ruse.

Then I stuffed up by giving old mate a mobile number that was my actual number with one digit changed. Turned out that number belonged to someone in Mascot, Sydney, who was already a signed-up customer to said sports store.

“Oh, right, yeah, there was a thing with the … um … numbers and stuff,” I explained, before trailing off to a mumble.

This cavalcade of lies – white lies, let’s be honest, but all certainly untrue – was all to get $20 off a pair of Nike sneakers and, more importantly, to avoid being added to yet another marketing list.

I’m sure plenty of marketing gurus have weighed up the pluses and minuses of bombarding customers with unwanted emails and text messages, but none of those gurus ever asked me.

If they did, I would tell them that people – most people I know – are thoroughly sick of it.

I recently bought a shirt from a well-known national retailer. It’s a fine enough shirt and fulfils its purpose of shielding the eyes of the general public from my rather second-rate rig. But that one purchase has resulted in no fewer than six emails.

This direct marketing from shops is annoying but it also highlights a bigger problem with trusting companies to look after our data.

Because if hackers can get into the data storage of organisations as big as Optus and Medibank Private, they sure as heck can get past the paywall of a clothing shop or sports store.

The Optus hack laid bare personal details such as names, birthdays, email addresses and, in some cases, Medicare numbers and driver licences which could potentially be used for identity fraud.

The Medibank hack is even more frightening, with deeply personal health details now likely in hackers’ hands. It’s a cyber nightmare. The modern world runs on data, and almost nothing goes unmeasured in 2022. We’ve all heard the phrase “you are the product”, and it’s truer than ever.

But people are right to be annoyed. Annoyed by multinational corporate giants that hold on to unnecessary information like driver licence numbers, leaving people open to identity fraud, by insurers failing to safeguard customers’ most private and sensitive information and, yes, even retailers who need to collect personal data before handing over a pair of Nikes or a new shirt for the purpose of bombarding you with ads that don’t actually work.

So from now on I’m sticking with Nathan Johnson, and if you live in Mascot and you’re getting texts telling you it’s time to buy a new pair of sneakers, I apologise profusely.