Wal-Mart's data collection

The NY Times is carrying a fascinating article about Wal-Mart's enormous consumer buying-habit database and its applications:

By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.

I'm torn between concern about possible abuses of this data and admiration for their impressively streamlined operation. Gathering data about the effectiveness of your operation, whatever it is, and then being able to turn around and feed that back into your process almost real-time, to cut costs and improve profits and productivity efficiently, is every CEO's dream. (Via Slashdot)