We’re watching: malls track shopper’s cell phone signals to gather marketing data
[Via Ars Technica]
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 US 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 cell phone signals. That data is collected and run through analytics by Path, and provided back to retailers through a secure website.
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Combine cell phone tracking with video and they would be able to follow the wanderings of anyone. Do I really want the mall to know exactly where I have been and for how long? What real benefit will I get?
How long before people figure out ways to degrade this process?
For me, another reason to ignore the mall or leave my cell phone in the car.
