Watching Your Wallet: The dangers of using loyalty programs to save money

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Whether it's cash back or rewards points, shoppers may be signing up for store loyalty programs to cut costs.

Financial experts say they may hurt more than help.

"They were designed to collect information from you, and today, monetizing that information and selling it to other people is much more valuable to the people providing loyalty programs than almost anything else," says Ron Zayas with Ironwall by Incogni.

Zayas says the information collected spans everything from shopping habits and locations to income levels and health concerns.

The data is used to build consumer profiles that can be sold to data brokers, and the risk goes beyond potential identity theft.

That information can also be used in more sophisticated scams.

"Most of what we do as humans are based upon patterns, so your password, where you bank, what you do -- those are usually based upon patterns," Zayas said. "If you live in a certain way, a place, it makes sense that you would bank in a certain area. If you have a certain economic level, then you would buy certain things. All this information can be sucked up, analyzed by AI in scale and then used to predict your password, predict where you do business and then give information to what's known as social engineering tax."

So how do we protect ourselves? Services including Incogni pull your information from data broker sites.

"Don't give your phone number out to anybody," Zayas said. "Your phone number doesn't change. How many times in the last 10 years have you changed your phone number? The average person has not."

Use different email accounts to sign up, or use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN that will encrypt your information and phone number.

"That's important because your internet service provider on your phone and on your computer collects everything about you and sells that information," Zayas said. "It's one of the number one ways that loyalty programs, data brokers and other places get information to fill out the picture of who you are."

Here in California, residents can stop data brokers from pulling and selling their information using the free Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or "DROP."

This state-run tool sends a deletion request to more than 600 registered data brokers at once, forcing them to erase your data.

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