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Cumulizer
This is a Make OpenData.ch Hackday Bern 2013 Finance-themed project with a focus on analyzing personal shopping data. We have started by aggregating data available from the Cumulus purchase points program run by Migros, but would be interested in expanding the concept to Coop Superpunkt and others.
Fundamentally, we believe that the data we help to collect when we make purchases is relevant and useful to us as individual shoppers, and we want to try provoking popular action to aggregate this (anonymously) with others in our community. We want to learn some of what the shops are already learning about us - what, when and where we make our purchases. Since their data is not open, we need to liberate our personal data by uploading it to a shared repository.
<GITHUB cstuder/cumulizer>
Data
Right now any customer who takes part in the Cumulus program can access detailed data about their purchases in CSV format. This is an excellent initiative from Migros, but the web site is not very user friendly so we would want to automate this process to make it easier for users.
Right now here are the steps to collect your data:
- Log into the Cumulus program using your customer number and a password on a paper mail-out to create an M-Connect account if you have not already
- Under Mein Konto - Kassenbons you can browse and view details of your shopping receipts
- Browsing month-by-month, and for every page, you need to click Alle, and then Ausgewählte Kassenbons als Excel-Liste (csv) (not “Übersicht”) to download a file with the details for those shopping trips
You are now ready to share your personal data with us. At the moment we do not have a live application, but if you are really eager to help, please send us your CSV files directly to cstuder@existenz.ch.
Project status
We are working on the initial prototype, aiming to complete Phase I by tomorrow and give a view into the user's own data.
In Phase II we are aiming to aggregate data from the community, allowing multiple users to share their data anonymously, and show common trends.
In Phase III we will be able to link our data with other sources, showing additional information about users purchases, and how buying trends align with semantically interlinked economic data.
Team
Links
- Solikarte is a related initiative for anonymously collecting points for charitable causes, and would be a possible data source and partner for this project
- One Receipt lets customers in the US see all their purchases in one place
- Opening Product Data for a more Responsible World (OKFN Blog) talks about the opportunities for open product data
- A Deep Dive into Facebook and Datalogix (Electronic Frontier Foundation) explores the marketing bonanza that is consumer data collection, and warns of the privacy risks
- What does the consumer data industry know about you (The Atlantic) explores a few more legal/societal perspectives