US Retailers Encounter Big Data Annoyance Hacker Love Attack Supermarket

In this fairly traditional industry, big data is also mixed with risks and profits.

Retail giants often hold millions or even tens of millions of consumers' purchase data or credit card data, but they are full of data security management. The profits gained after selling data are not present in front of potential investors because of the current accounting standards.

Hackers love supermarkets

Hackers like to attack all kinds of bank networks or steal passwords, and the most favorite targets are the chain retailers.

Large supermarket chains are distributed all over the country, and millions of customers' payment information is stored in the same system. Security awareness or resistance level is not comparable to that of banks or other technology companies.

This probably explains why American retail giants have been almost taken turns stealing data in recent years, leading to tens of millions of customers' credit card information leaks.

In September of this year, HomeDepot, a large home chain store, became the latest retailer to pay information theft.

According to preliminary analysis, the leak may have affected the home depot company's 2200 branches across the United States.

This means that about 4 million credit card or savings card information is stolen.

In addition to home depot, recently a series of retailers, such as supermarket chains, "super price stores" and American Chinese food chain P.F.Chang, have been stolen by hackers.

Also in September, Goodwill, a charity second-hand store, said its customers' credit card information was stolen in more than 300 stores.

The invasion of US chain store Target by the end of last year is a huge turning point in the payment card industry in recent years.

At that time, the Target company's network was hacked, and a total of 40 million customers' payment card information was stolen.

After the incident, Target companies are still trying to eliminate the remnants of the impact.

Information theft has hurt the company's share price and reputation. Target also needs to spend $100 million to enhance its information security measures in its 1800 stores.

In addition to restaurants, supermarkets and other retail businesses, the data leakage of the hotel industry has also made many customers handless.

The huge exposure of information leakage in the service industry has brought consumers to the freezing point of whether businesses can effectively protect their personal data.

Customers' bank payment information brings risks to retailers, but the other part is glittering.

The US Kroger Co, which owns 2600 chain supermarkets, records the purchase data of each customer, and also tracks the history of the purchase of 5 million 500 thousand members.

Kroger Co analyzed the data and sold them to various suppliers from soda to oatmeal.

And consumer goods manufacturers like Procter & Gamble and Nestle are very interested in these data, hoping to get customer preferences from the data to help.

And marketing.

Some analysts believe that he will earn $100 million a year by selling these data.

Kroger Co remained silent about this, saying it had followed the general accounting principles.

According to these principles, the company can not calculate the data as an asset, nor can the cost of collecting and analyzing data be used as investment in the company.

Kroger Co can get extra benefits from these data, but has not really fully utilized the potential value of these data.

For example, because the current or future value of big data can not be reflected in the company's earnings report, this part of the content actually becomes a blind spot in the eyes of investors, which often makes investors underestimate the development potential of the company.

More and more companies begin to broaden their profit channels by means of information paction and big data analysis tools. But how to evaluate big data as an asset is still a blank in the current business world.

To evaluate big data, companies need to estimate the shelf life of their data, and need to keep track of their value and possible changes at any time.

It is easy to estimate the tangible assets such as factory buildings, but there seems to be no precedent for estimating the potential value of big data.

Equivalent to more than half of Europe's GDP

Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, LeonardNakamura, said in a study that the total value of intangible assets of all business companies is up to 8 trillion US dollars, equivalent to the sum of GDP in Germany, France and Italy.

These intangible assets include patents, trademarks and copyrights, including big data.

The role of these intangible assets in the global economy is becoming increasingly important.

For example, in the past few years, a series of mergers and acquisitions initiated by technology giants such as Google, apple and Samsung have revolved around the ownership of patents.

However, none of these intangible assets appear in the company's financial statements.

"We hope to have more accounting information on intangible assets so that we can better understand how companies are investing in future growth."

Nakamura said.

In view of the fact that today's economic structure is increasingly dependent on information and intellectual property rights, the US financial accounting standards committee is committed to updating the accounting standards.

As early as 2002 and 2007, the financial accounting standards board of the United States had discussed the issue of intangible assets for the two time, but each time it was resolved before the divergence.

It was not until September this year that some of the committee's advisers raised the question again.

"The real potential of many companies is not reflected in publicly disclosed information or earnings reports."

Glenn Kenico, manager of Investment Banking Department of Dao Heng company, said GlenKernick.