Corporations are increasingly including checkout-free shopping as a way to get rid of cashiers and instead use systems that detect shoppers’ product preferences and bill them.

Tesco’s first checkout-free store in central London, GetGo, is what inspired the Irish group to pay attention, considering that in addition to having an app in order to pay and get receipts, customers must also become members of Clubcard.

From there on it’s the usual story: in exchange for some benefits, customers hand over the retailer their personal data, and apparently, a large amount of such data, too.

That, argues ICCL, violates “data minimization” – a principle present both in EU’s personal data protection rules, and in those in the UK devised post-Brexit.

Data minimization refers to limiting the collection of personal information only to that which is directly relevant and necessary for a specific purpose.