Tired of paying with cash at your favorite coffee shop? A Japanese coffee shop is offering free coffee, but for a different currency.
At Japanese chain Shiru Cafe, you pay with your personal information, instead of money. Students and faculty members hand over their ID, which includes personal information such as names, dates of birth and work experience. They then go through an online registration process. Upon successful registration, customers can order free coffee and some other drinks.
The Japanese coffee chain has over 28 stores around the world, mostly located at prestigious universities. By providing personal information, Shiru Cafe bombards students with corporate advertisements. The advertisements include logos, apps, digital displays on mobile devices, surveys, and more.
“Through a free drink, we try to give students some information that sponsors would like to provide them exclusively, to diversify their future career choices,” says the company's official website.
According to the report, customers don't seem to have a problem providing their personal information for free drinks or coffee. Nina Wolff Landau, a freshman at Brown University, says the data is already available on other apps like LinkedIn and can be found with a simple Google search .
“Maybe I should be more careful, but everyone has our details at this point anyway, so giving my name, personal email, and field of study to third parties doesn’t seem that risky to me,” says Nina.
It seems like it all boils down to the privacy paradox in a world where people worry about their personal data being misused by corporations and tech giants.
