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Real-World Analytics: Shops secretly track customers via mobile phone
- axod 18y ago"should the data fall into the wrong hands." What sort of wrong hands could make use of data like this??? They would know that a certain IMEI code was in a certain shopping center at a certain time :/ wow.
- danw 18y agoThis has been happening for some time, and you can build your own using gnuRadio if you wish to give it a try
- jws 18y agoI like all the protesting that they can't track the IMEI code back to a person. They either don't want to, or they need better nerds. With the {IMEI,time,location} that this produces and the {store,creditcard,time} that the credit card machines produce I could have reasonably reliable {IMEI,creditcard} mappings in two transactions, very reliable in three. (except for your friends traveling with you, I'll have to wait for you to shop without them to separate your identities)
- kogir 18y agoI love how people feel that collecting data they're broadcasting into the open with no expectation of privacy is a privacy violation. Think of it as your neighbors recording when the lights in your house are on or off. It may be weird, but it's hardly wrong.
- ComputerGuru 18y agoIt seems that phones also transmit a phone number along with the IMEI code; and a phone number certainly isn't anonymous. Discussion is in the comments here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/mapping-computer-techniques-to-the-real-world/ http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/mapping-computer-techniques-to...