The reason loyalty cards multiplied when they did has little to do with rewarding regulars. Advertising had been built on third-party cookies, which follow a person across unrelated websites; as browsers began phasing those out over privacy objections, brands needed another way to know who their customers are. First-party data (information a brand collects with direct consent through its own interactions) became the replacement, and a loyalty programme is the cleanest instrument for gathering it, because the customer volunteers an identity and a purchase history in exchange for a discount. YouGov's own write-up presents programmes explicitly as a solution to the privacy climate, which is also precisely the suspicion that makes a large share of shoppers uneasy about them. The measured attitudes sit right on that fault line. Half of consumers say loyalty programmes matter more than ever, and 53% say membership makes them feel more emotionally connected to a brand, up from 46% two years earlier. But 52% say they would quit a programme whose rewards stopped being worth it, while only 41% say a data breach would make them leave. That suggests most members have already priced the data in.