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Rob Cockerham has a reputation as something of a prankster.
In 2003, his website, Cockeyed.com, won a Webby Award for best personal website, partly on the strength of a series of pranks he pulled off in his hometown of Sacramento, California.
In the past several months, Cockerham has expanded the site's reach, and is rallying people around the United States and Canada in a bid to take on what some consider an invasion of their privacy.
For millions of major supermarket shoppers, a discount card has become a way of life: In exchange for personal data, the store hands over a card that is good for discounts. Yet few know what happens to their information once they get their card.
And that bothers social activists like Cockerham, a 34-year-old Web producer. "In the past, there had always been savings without the trade, so I guess I was being forced to renegotiate," he said. "I don't feel like it's their information. I feel like it's mine."
With that in mind, Cockerham is organizing some of his fans in a gambit called The Ultimate Shopper, which screws around with über-chain Safeway's Club Card system.
He signed up for a new Club Card and began offering Cockeyed.com visitors stickers with his card's bar code. By placing the stickers on their cards, would-be Rob Cockerhams can band together, creating a single shopper with massive buying power. More importantly, they are monkeying with Safeway's data collection, and employing the Web to do it.
"I like using the Internet in a way that forms a community, or encourages community activity," Cockerham said, "and those (ways) aren't always pro-business."
For the 300 or so who have signed up, shopping as Rob Cockerham presents the chance to buy what they want in anonymity.
Dennis Hescox, a software engineer from Citrus Heights, California, had long balked at having to turn over personal data in order to save money. "I'm really glad I'm bollixing Safeway's system," he said. "I don't want to be advertised to, and I don't want to be categorized and marketed to."
Cockerham's effort isn't the first method wary shoppers have used to get membership markdowns without revealing personal buying habits. Felix Baum, a 35-year-old software engineer in Oakland, California, says he uses a series of phone numbers to save money when he goes grocery shopping.
"You don't have to have the card in order to get discounts," Baum says. Cashiers will accept phone numbers in lieu of cards. "And since my privacy is my concern, the only ethical solution is to forge someone else's identity."
Others simply swap cards. Hescox says that before stumbling onto Cockerham's project, he traded Safeway cards with anyone who was willing. That way, though his account was active and registering transactions, it didn't correlate with his purchasing patterns.
Here, too, the Internet plays a role in organizing protest against the chains' information gathering. Rob Carlson's website promotes an electronic card swap for members of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area Giant supermarket chain. Participants enter their card numbers in a form on the site and then print out and paste onto their cards someone else's bar code.
"While Rob Cockerham went all the way in printing and mailing copies of his bar code, my project is more the middle step: an online do-it-yourself identity-swapping system," Carlson said. "At first it was just another fun culture-jamming project. The more I think about it, though, I realize that my site adds a little noise and uncertainty to the supermarket tracking systems."
"Hopefully both my website and Rob Cockerham's project cause a visitor to stop and think about how they are being tracked and consider the value of their privacy," Carlson said.
While some might see the collection of shoppers' data as benign, Carlson isn't so sure. "What right does the supermarket have to use this data?" he asks. "If a customer slips and falls in an aisle, can a purchasing history which includes two or three bottles of Jack Daniels a week be used in court to allege that the customer was walking around in an alcoholic daze?"
For its part, Safeway isn't concerned about Cockerham's project and shrugs off any Big Brother accusations. "It's an odd sort of prank with not any significant impact at all on the operation of our card business," says Safeway spokeman Brian Dowling. "We work hard to protect the privacy of our customers, and don't believe there is any sound rationale behind what (Cockerham's) doing. But he can do whatever he wants."
Giant did not return a call requesting comment.
These days, Cockerham is enjoying the fruits of his efforts, knowing that namesakes all over North America are racking up bagels, beer, condoms and other products at a furious pace. And his enthusiastic fans prove his Webby was no fluke.
Recently, he sold a Safeway Club Card on eBay, and the 1/32-inch-thick piece of plastic fetched $21.53. "Supporting Rob and his site is more than worth the $21," gushed the buyer, Ian Craig, adding that owning an original Rob Cockerham Club Card "is just icing on the cake."
Meanwhile, musing about what he would do if Safeway ever shut down the ultimate shopper account, Cockerham laughs. "Is there a contingency plan? I think I'd just sign up (again) under the name George Orwell."
