{"id":1813,"date":"2026-05-30T13:49:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T13:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1813"},"modified":"2026-06-04T13:56:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T13:56:20","slug":"pii-roi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1813","title":{"rendered":"PII ROI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
She learned through peers and social media 
that birthdays are profitable.
That by giving a bit of PII to retailers, 
she could convert free text fields into dollars.
Birth dates into scoops of ice cream, 
bags of chips, buckets of soda.

And she found this to be an epic bargain.
So she added her name, 
her day of joining the planet, 
her postal zip to a dozen forms.

Those bits and bytes 
of her identity whooshed off into the cloud 
\u2014 and unseen overlords, 
who to-date have proven 
so trustworthy of the consumer\u2019s welfare. 

Later, in the afternoon, 
once all her incoming celebration emails 
had hit her account, 
she convinced her Dad 
to drive her around town, 
to cash in on her work.

She collected mint chocolate chip 
and hibiscus limeade 
and hot tortilla chips 
and free guacamole.
She grabbed a dollar off a decaf latte 
and 10% off plastic toys 
at the local big box store.

And she felt victorious, 
glorious, smart and savvy.
And I wonder, 
what did she trade away, 
with all her data?

For the hard serve 
has been metabolized,
the drink cup recycled, 
the chip bag discarded, 
the plastic toy forgotten.

But her identity?
That, however, 
will live on in others' hands forever.

<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cPII ROI\u201d an observation of the transactional practice of exchanging personal data for merchant deals, and wondering at the true price of a deal. Written Saturday, May 30, poem 150 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: “Free ice cream – Deal!” by Diana Ludwick (c) 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,262,311,2,776],"tags":[1311,373,1316,1319,1310,1321,1313,1315,1314,932,1318,1320,865,1309,1308,1312,1323,1324,581,705,641,1322,134,1317,261],"class_list":["post-1813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-dry-humor","category-generational","category-poems","category-short-form-musings","tag-bargain","tag-birthday","tag-consumer","tag-data","tag-deal","tag-decaf","tag-discarded","tag-drive","tag-forgotten","tag-ice-cream","tag-intel","tag-latte","tag-may","tag-merchants","tag-pii","tag-plastic","tag-profitable","tag-retailers","tag-roi","tag-saturday","tag-social-media","tag-soda","tag-summer","tag-the-cloud","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1847,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions\/1847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}