APT was a very interesting company. It was a hybrid between a business consulting company and a software company.

And by that I mean, if you saw them at the Harvard career fair they would tell you that they were a consulting company, and if you saw them at the CMU career fair they would tell you that they were a software company. Because they preferred to hire their consultants from Harvard (and others) and their software developers from CMU (and others).

And the truth was in the middle. The software half of the company built data analysis and business analytics software platforms, that the consulting half of the business drove on behalf of clients as part of engagements.

It was a consulting company that, rather than building their consulting work on a mess of excel and powerpoint, built it on a robust in-house data analysis platform instead.

Quite a unique place.

I wonder if the law changed, or if the root cause of this being allowed is an enforcement / judicial issue.

I also wonder if they managed to get a carve out for themselves in California’s recently-passed universal data broker opt-out law.

I'd love to see how this data is "anonymised".

On a related note, in the UK at least, all of the big supermarkets have switched their loyalty card (data harvesting schemes) from offering "points" per unit spend to offering direct large discounts on certain items in store. Makes it much more difficult to justify opting out of giving away the details of your personal shopping habits to these corporations.