Want Free Coffee? Personal Data Is The Way To Pay
Shiru Cafe. Photo by Chaiel Schaffel for RIPR
Shiru Cafe looks like a regular coffee shop. Inside, machines whir, baristas dispense caffeine and customers hammer away on laptops. All of the customers are students, and there’s a reason for that. At Shiru Cafe, no college ID means no caffeine.
“We definitely have some people that walk in off the street that are a little confused and a little taken aback when we can’t sell them any coffee,” said Sarah Ferris, assistant manager Shiru Cafe’s Providence branch, located near Brown University.
Ferris will turn away customers if they’re not college students or faculty members. The café allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown’s lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. And if that seems a little invasive, Ferris said the students don’t seem to mind. She doesn’t think she’s seen a single customer refuse to give up the data.
I certainly didn’t seem bother Nina Wolff Landau, a junior at Brown University. She’s studying environmental studies, which the café already knows. Landau said the data collected is easily accessible on LinkedIn or other websites with a quick Google search.
“Maybe I should have been more apprehensive, but everyone has your information at this point anyway,” she said. “To give out my name and email and what I study does not seem so risky to me.”