It’s absolutely possible. It would depend on the store but I’m guessing a store that has a loyalty program is interested enough in analyzing customer data that they would use your credit card as a unique identifier of you as a customer, especially for transactions where there wasn’t a loyalty number entered.

How appropriate. You’ve aged like a cow.

Similar to that, just because someone works in IT, doesn’t mean they can fix your computer problem. I’ve worked with a lot of developers who were great coders but couldn’t resolve networking or random OS issues.

Not exactly secret, but not very well-known. In many states your credit score can be used as a factor in determining the cost of auto insurance for you. Lower credit scores can equal higher premiums.

Here’s something totally bizarre that you might it might not care about.

The other day I brought up Metroid on the Nintendo Switch NES app (the one that lets you play some NES games with an online subscription.) After playing for a bit, I wanted to show him the Justin Bailey code. But I couldn’t remember it exactly at first. So I tried it in various cases, and when I enter the code with all lowercase letters, it crashed the game.

No idea if it’ll do that for everyone, or if it did that on the actual NES, but I tried it a few times and it crashed everything.

For reference, I entered in the code like this:

justin bailey
------ ------

But the actual code is:

JUSTIN BAILEY
------ ------

I thought your post said NASA at first, and I was really skeptical.