I wonder why they're using WiFi signals instead of just analyzing the video feeds from their surveillance systems. It would probably glean the same information.
Either way, I don't have a problem with this as long as they aren't intercepting communications or anything private like my name and recognizing me every time I enter the store. If it's information that they can obtain without identifying me, there isn't much I can complain about. It's their store and as long as my rights are intact I'm cool with it.
(Until recently I was the co-founder/CTO at RetailNext - we analyze shopper behavior in retail stores, primarily using computer vision but also using WiFi signals and other methods.)
WiFi signals contain a device MAC, which gives us a unique ID on the customer. This allows us to track repeat visits to a store, and even visits to different stores within the same retail chain. We can also track the WiFi "pings" from your device to see approximately how long you were in the store, whether you passed by the store without walking in, etc. Essentially the physical-world equivalent of data that google analytics provides you for your website.
The type of data described above is not quite possible to obtain via video as face recognition is nowhere near as robust, certainly not when it needs to be done non-intrusively as in a retail environment.
Video is still very useful however as it gives us 100% customer coverage - many customers still don't have smartphones, many that do keep WiFi turned off, many stores don't have WiFi APs, etc.
I'm not an expert, but I have looked into some of the basics before and computer vision is really freaking hard to do very well. It's relatively easy to get a basic proof of concept up and running, but in a store you have people carrying shopping bags, people moving products and things around, employees going about their business, people pushing shopping carts around, and have kids running around. I'm sure this presents a considerable challenge to accurately track what's going on just by relying on analyzing video feeds without human intervention. In contrast, it's pretty much easier to just track WiFi signals.
As long as no personally identifying information such as a phone number or some sort of phone ID is gathered without a customer deliberately giving it to the company and tracking cookies aren't used without permission, I wouldn't think there's much of an issue here. I might even appreciate, with some kind of deliberate opt-in, seeing some coupons or sales info showing up on my phone when I'm spending 5-10 minutes in one single section of the store.
This is still a potential privacy issue if they're somehow using cookies or some other information to track people without their consent, but as it's presumably on private property this is a different kind of privacy issue than government spying.
> or some sort of phone ID is gathered without a customer deliberately giving it to the company
Chances are better than good that they're capturing your MAC address. While not necessarily unique, on cell phones, it's probably as good as in the vast majority of cases.
> I wonder why they're using WiFi signals instead of just analyzing the video feeds from their surveillance systems. It would probably glean the same information.
With WiFi signals they can uniquely identify a single customer (by MAC) without having to rely on facial recognition or complex image processing. I'm guessing that's the reason.
Ah, that makes sense. Don't know how I feel about being uniquely identified though. I thought they were just gathering things like movements and gender.
Only your device MAC is collected though, to track things like repeat visits, so I think it's similar to how websites track your IP. There is no "database" today to associate the device MAC back to any personal information.
"There is no "database" today to associate the device MAC back to any personal information."
You can _say_ that, but the marketing-hacker in me is already thinking about how to hook the wifi MAC address to the credit card payment database, and how to run in-store specials "Like us on Facebook via our free wifi to get $super-special-deal!"
I think saying "There is no "database" today … " is disingenuous at best. I would bet with 100% certainty that someone, somewhere, has been collecting and correlating MAC addresses and individual's identities, and is almost certainly selling access to exactly that database.
(Cynical thought, what're the chances that Apple aren't, right now, already doing realtime lookups on the purchase histories of the original owners of wifi capable iOS device that arrive in their stores with the wifi switched on?)
I should've clarified - there is no database today that is accessible to retailers and/or tracking software vendors. Device vendors like Apple certainly have a database that maps device UDID/MAC to your personal information, but they are very serious about protecting it. Today :)
In the better retail video systems, video is time-synced with the registers. I'm not sure how many are doing it right now, but indoor tracking and indoor mapping people would be foolish to not sync their data with the registers as well.
Put another way...
It is a trivial matter to know that it was your phone at the register when your debit card was used.
But they would still only have MAC address and charge, credit or debit card info.
Electronic payments are an entirely separate issue and there ought to be strong legal requirements preventing retailers and credit card companies from sharing data about people's purchases. Or, better yet, anonymous electronic cash like BitCoin.
While the invasiveness of a database of purchases linked to identities by credit card is substantial, it is orthogonal to the collection of how the user walked through the store. That hardly adds any additional value for anyone when it's just one datapoint. It's completely useless to insurance companies, maybe useful in aggregate to other stores. The point is to more effectively lay out displays to drive impulse purchases from people in aggregate. It would not be in Target's interest to let Wal-Mart know what the traffic pattern is in a Target.
If you are not already disclosing the fact that you shopped at the store by using a credit card, then there is nothing to tie your MAC address to your identity.
iOS and Android devices send a WiFi "ping" every so often - I believe this is done to improve locationing accuracy, by augmenting GPS data with WiFi signal strength data. You can read these pings from any AP, even if the device is not associated with the AP. You'll only get the device MAC, but that's enough to tell you the device make and get a unique ID on the customer.
And remember to turn off Bluetooth as well - the wifi and bluetooth MAC addresses are sequential - if you see one you know the other.
More paranoidly… A femtocell could fool your phone into revealing your phone number over the GSM/CDMA transmitter's channel. If I were involved in some extremely high value sale where the identity of potential purchasers was not always known, and where knowing it earlier might help close a sale (perhaps real estate or luxury cars?) - it'd be _so_ tempting to at least trial soemthing borderline-evil like that. (And now I'm inventing a small network of femtocells with directional antennas in white vans parked outside competitors - to track which of your potential customers are visiting which competitors…)
Either way, I don't have a problem with this as long as they aren't intercepting communications or anything private like my name and recognizing me every time I enter the store. If it's information that they can obtain without identifying me, there isn't much I can complain about. It's their store and as long as my rights are intact I'm cool with it.