Eye see u Willis
Sort of disturbing, but sadly inevitable. All of our behavior is grist for the marketing mill.
Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers — at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the U.S. have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to “cookies” human beings carry — their cell phones.
The technology, from Portsmouth, England-based Path Intelligence, is called Footpath. It uses monitoring units distributed throughout a mall or retail environment to sense the movement of customers by triangulation, using the strength of their cellphone signals. That data is collected and run through analytics by Path, and provided back to retailers through a secure website. On March 31, Path CEO Sharon Biggar presented the tech at the ICSC Fusion conference in Los Angeles. She discussed how data collected by Footpath could be used by retailers to boost revenue. Options include tracking response to mailers and other advertising by providing the equivalent of web metrics like unique visitors, “page impressions” (measuring how many people walked past a display or advertisement), and “click-through” (determining how many people who passed an advertisement then visited the store associated with it). “Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts,” she said, “and perhaps more importantly we can price the advertising differently at each location.”
(click here to continue reading We’re Watching: Malls Track Shoppers’ Cellphone Signals to Gather Marketing Data | Epicenter | Wired.com.)
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update 2:06 pm
Hmm, maybe not quite yet:
You may now shop two malls again without fear of individualized tracking—at least by your cell phone signal. Privacy concerns raised by US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) have ended plans by malls in southern California and Virginia to “survey” customers’ shopping habits by tracking their cell phone signals.
… Forest City had planned to conduct the trial until the end of December. However, just a day after the trial began, Sen. Schumer contacted Forest City to raise his concerns. In a press conference on Sunday, Schumer said that the malls should have allowed customers to opt into the survey, rather than having to “opt out” by turning off their cell phones. “A shopper’s personal cell phone should not be used by a third party as a tracking device by retailers,” Schumer said in a press conference on Sunday. “Personal cell phones are just that — personal. If retailers want to tap into your phone to see what your shopping patterns are, they can ask you for your permission to do so.”
Schumer also sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz asking the FTC to look into whether Path’s technology was legal in the U.S.
Forest City has not abandoned plans for the survey, however.
(click here to continue reading Mall Owners Pull Plug on Cellular Tracking (For Now) | Epicenter | Wired.com.)