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> "This is why we chose vibration sensors and light sensors. No liability from owning any personally identifiable information." 1) Regardless of what they migh
by chiefalchemist 6y ago
> "This is why we chose vibration sensors and light sensors. No liability from owning any personally identifiable information."
1) Regardless of what they might think, I would hope they let customers know they were being observed and tracked.
2) Phone location and/or a sales transaction could put an identity to this data. Mind you, they might have resisted temptations, but that's not going to be true across the board. At some point, perhaps already, someone somewhere has crossed that line.
- neilv 6y agoExcellent point. I'd also like to highlight this quote: > With only vibration and light, there simply is nothing there to identify individual shoppers. Their approach seems to have some privacy merit, but I'm a little discouraged to see claims that appear to be salespersonship, not engineering nor science. In addition to what you pointed out (and possibly also correlating "anonymized" shopper with cameras at checkout and/or entryways), I'd also be a little curious about what all is picked up by the vibration sensors. Can they sense steps/gait/shoes at all? Any qualities of voice? And, hypothetically, even if the sensors in the current version could really only detect touching of the product, no matter how much signal processing and ML one throws at it, what happens when there's B2B sales incentive to disambiguate movement of individual shoppers, or to link them to identifying info with more accuracy than currently, and quietly upgrading the vibration sensor would enable that?
- chiefalchemist 6y agoCall me paranoid but I've read similar in the past, and I'm reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" now. Some start up will productize this offline B&M tracking, and then some Tech Giant will snatch them up and hoover that data. And so on. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...