15 ms·

Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell

117 points by tippytop 13y ago

darxius 13y ago
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.
- chrischen 13y ago
  It's probably much easier to do WiFi than video.
- AlexandrB 13y ago
  > 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.
  - darxius 13y ago
    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.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      You can't gather movements without a unique identifier. How would know which points belong to which path? The MAC address doesn't lead to your name, address, credit card, or anything. It's just how they tell one phone from another.
      - edmond_dantes 13y ago
        Until that information is associated with you when you pass through the POS and pay for your goods.
        superuser2 13y ago
        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.
    - nairteashop 13y ago
      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.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        "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?)
        nairteashop 13y ago
        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 :)
      - pbsdp 13y ago
        Sure there is. Remember how your iPhone had to be activated with the carrier? Or how all that analytics software would use the MAC either as a UDID, or to derive one?
      - bilbo0s 13y ago
        Actually, there is. 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. Of course... that may be all they need.
  - tmzt 13y ago
    How are they doing this if the device isn't associating with an access point or broadcasting beacons?
    - nairteashop 13y ago
      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.
      - darxius 13y ago
        Is there a way to disable this?
        nairteashop 13y ago
        As far as I know, the only way to disable the WiFi "pings" is to turn off WiFi on your device when you don't need it.
        darxius 13y ago
        Cool, thanks.
        bigiain 13y ago
        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…)
- throwaway420 13y ago
  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.
  - cheald 13y ago
    > 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.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  (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.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    aha - unique MAC address. Thank you - that beats facial recognition. I was wondering why. HN: a thermometer for frogs in nearly boiling water.
nness 13y ago
I don't particularly see an issue with this, but I welcome any insights to convince me otherwise. You have no expectation of privacy when in public. My question is whether there is any difference to someone following you around a mall as you go through your shopping journey (whether with cameras or in person even), as compared to someone following your phone?
- obituary_latte 13y ago
  Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.
  - joonix 13y ago
    So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
    - jevinskie 13y ago
      I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
      - superuser2 13y ago
        Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
        gradstudent 13y ago
        We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
While still in college, one my senior papers involved analysis of patterns of movement in a large local bar/nightclub. The owners had changed the layout of the club several times and were losing money every weekend. After spending time doing some simple observations, I made a few suggestions and after a two week period of implementation, they were making 8-10% more per weekend. I'm always surprised when I see people who are convinced technology can solve their woes when all you need to do is make some observations. No wi-fi tracking will tell you there's a huge clearance rack blocking your view of several other items. It also won't tell you if a merchandise row is so narrow only one person can stand in front of a display. Technology is great, but in most retail or commercial environment's, you still need feet on the ground.
- mgurlitz 13y ago
  It doesn't make sense for Nordstrom to hire a consultant for each underperforming store -- they can save money and make better decisions by using data collection technology. Anyone could go to a retailer on a slow afternoon, see open registers with no one in line, and determine that they could save money by having fewer cashiers. But having the data allows the company make those decisions with much more confidence.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    Exactly. Wifi tracking is built into enterprise wifi systems like meraki or aerohive. It's basically already there, so it's going to be way cheaper to implement than having dedicated people eyeballing every store constantly.
  - bennyg 13y ago
    There's a TON of intangibles that this data absolutely cannot tell you. Watch people's facial expressions as they look at the end of aisle displays. Watch where the kids go, and you can probably sell to their parents there too. Everyone wants to automate around here, and sometimes the other way is actually better.
  - VLM 13y ago
    The TLDR is its risk avoidance. If it doesn't work, and decisions were made by people, then people, and the people who hired their services are to blame. On the other hand, if decisions were made by numbers, and it doesn't work, no one is to blame, what are you going to do, fire the number 7.356 ?
gojomo 13y ago
To opt out, before entering a store, turn off your phone and put on a ski mask. "Are you here to rob us?" "No, I'm just opting out of your facial-tracking systems. Which way to kitchen appliances?"
- otibom 13y ago
  Ironically if you're the only guy with a ski mask you're not hard to track.
  - tokipin 13y ago
    we should go the route of the Three Amigos' Amigos Amigos Amigos strategy
- scrrr 13y ago
  There's a business opportunity. Rent-a-shopper. Anonymize your purchases by having another person do your shopping. Pick up your purchases at a rent-a-shopper pick up point near you. I wonder what percentage of the population cares about being profiled though. Less than 5%? It's a niche business opportunity.
  - adrianb 13y ago
    Why would I trust the rent-a-shopper pick-up point? They might be tracking me as well. Once started, paranoia goes all the way.
  - endersshadow 13y ago
    Task Rabbit already does this, ostensibly. We have people go to Ikea for us because screw going to Ikea.
jlgaddis 13y ago
Who's going to build the mobile application that monitors the user's location (via GPS) and automatically sets the wireless NIC's MAC address to a specific value whenever the user is near one of these stores (and isn't connected to a real wireless network)? Surely having a handful of shoppers who all have the same MAC address in one store at one time would screw up their analysis a little bit, no? It would certainly make it much more difficult to track a specific individual.
- informatimago 13y ago
  MAC addresses are unique, unless hacked.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    That's kinda the point of setting everyone's to the same value.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
How does wifi tracking work? How do you do directional finding? I assume they cannot have a thousand access points per store? Frankly I would assume using computer vision to track heads like molecules in Brownian motion would be cheaper simpler in all cases. However this one creeps me out far more than NSA. Odd really
- rwg 13y ago
  You don't need a super-dense AP deployment for location tracking of clients to work. A client that's actively looking for networks to join will occasionally broadcast a probe request frame on all of the channels it can transmit on, trying to get nearby access points to respond. If you have at least three access points that "hear" the same probe request and you know where those access points are located, you can use the position information of the access points combined with the received signal strength of the probe request frame at each access point to compute that client's position.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    It still sounds unlikely without working it through. I guess the inverse power law applies, and signals are pretty weak to start with, so differences of a few metres will make a big drop. How accurate are these systems (someone implied it came as standard on certain APs)? what is the density for say 50cm resolution - any papers on this? thank you
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      just a quick follow up - I noticed that "is sounds unlikely" is doubting your statement - I am sure the directional / location of wifi is pretty accurate - its just my intuition about such things is so wildly off I would need to do some cacls on signal strength over metres of distance. Interesting thanks
Houshalter 13y ago
I'm not as disturbed by them tracking their customers (I mean they've always had cameras in stores and recorded all your purchases anyways), as I am to the amount of effort and efficiency that goes into maximizing the amount of stuff they sell people. Like putting the milk in the back of the store so you see 50 other things on the way that you also might want to get, or putting ".99" at the end of the price tag to abuse our inability to estimate numbers. It's the same tricks basically, just far more efficient. Making the optimal store layouts so customers spend as much time inside as possible or get exposed to as many other items as possible. Use machine learning algorithms to set the prices so every price is as high as it can be before people stop buying it entirely.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Meh, these same tricks have always backfired. Yes, they've been placing food/beverages at the back since years ago. This also means that customers that are in a hurry to buy bread/food/milk/whatever are more likely to go to their local grocery store. As we, the customers, may be stupid enough to buy into their .99 tricks, but we aren't so stupid as to not notice that it took 3 hours to buy milk or bread, as many times you're really not in the mood to gape at useless shit. It's interesting though that local grocery stores are not so common in the U.S., compared to Europe. To get food, I only need to cross the street. Also, setting the prices dynamically will not work in an online world. What if customers had a mobile app with which they could compare prices with other retailers just by scanning the bar code? Again, customers aren't so stupid - they may not notice that the price of individual items has gone up, but they do notice fluctuations in their monthly spending.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I can testify that the milk trick does work, at least with my own family. They say they will promise to only spend a minute getting milk and end up buying a bunch of other groceries as well. Dynamic price setting works because people are not perfect rational actors that compare every single item they look at to the lowest price in town. I don't know if anyone does that actually. People might notice a bigger shopping bill, but they are more likely to attribute it to buying more than slightly higher prices on every single item, which they might not even notice. In any case they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make them more money.
Amadou 13y ago
But while consumers seem to have no problem with cookies, profiles and other online tools that let e-commerce sites know who they are and how they shop, some bristle at the physical version That is a profoundly ignorant statement to make - the vast majority of web users have no concept of the scope at which they are being tracked online. If there was a sign spelling out all the trackers on every web page like there was a sign in the store, you can be sure a whole lot more people would be "bristling."
- llamataboot 13y ago
  Every friend I have gotten to install ghostery has been pretty shocked.
dm2 13y ago
Here is a video about the Euclid software. This service makes the Wifi tracking even scarier because it can track across different stores, then they probably sell that data. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4W1GIRHC_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4W1GIRHC_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86DxCqfHjY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86DxCqfHjY Here is a way to opt-out of this particular service. https://signup.euclidelements.com/optout https://signup.euclidelements.com/optout It seems like it would be trivial to tie in the location tracking with the products someone purchases and if you are using a rewards card (like most grocery stores have) then the store has all of your information tied to your MAC address. It's not just stores, any place could have these systems set up. Malls, airports, stadiums, schools, or even your workplace. Is it possible to obscure or modify a phones wifi strength when not connected to a network to prevent this tracking?
- pdx 13y ago
  I just watched the video. They mention that they use equipment from http://www.aerohive.com/ http://www.aerohive.com/, which just seem to be normal wifi infrastructure. It seems like only people who actually connect to the wifi can be tracked. There's no way to harvest the MAC address of a wifi device that hasn't connected to your network, is there? As a store, this seems to be not that valuable to me. I can't imagine that very many shoppers actually take the time from shopping to decide to connect to your wifi. I get that they only need to do this once, and after that, it will auto-reconnect. I'm still not buying it as an effective tracking method.
  - napoleond 13y ago
    There's no way to harvest the MAC address of a wifi device that hasn't connected to your network, is there? Yes, there is. If you set your WLAN interface to monitor mode and run tcpdump or similar, you can look at packets passing by, even if you're not connected to a network at all. I built a Wifi tracking system this way when I was in school.
    - pdx 13y ago
      Thanks for that. I wanted to understand how this was working. This seems like a pretty powerful data source to use for all sorts of things, if it's always accessible like that. A world readable cookie for every yuppie and hipster on the planet!
16s 13y ago
Were it not for their name, "Cookies" would not be generally accepted. We should have named them "Roaches", then no one would say, well it's just a roach.
p6rny 13y ago
can Google be doing this to the whole city where they provide free WIFI for the city?
waster 13y ago
So at the cost of usability (for the cell user), wouldn't a product (or homemade solution: Hello, tin foil!) that blocks RFID/wifi signals wrapped around the phone also foil (ouch) this tracking? I'm thinking something like Blokket (http://howsyourrobot.com/2012/09/26/blokket-blocks-rfid-wifi-signals/ http://howsyourrobot.com/2012/09/26/blokket-blocks-rfid-wifi... - I have no direct knowledge of this product, BTW; just googled RFID/wifi blocking). Obviously this won't work for facial recognition, but I see that's discussed in other comments.

117 points by tippytop 13y ago

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.

chrischen 13y ago
It's probably much easier to do WiFi than video.
AlexandrB 13y ago
> 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.
- darxius 13y ago
  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.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    You can't gather movements without a unique identifier. How would know which points belong to which path? The MAC address doesn't lead to your name, address, credit card, or anything. It's just how they tell one phone from another.
    - edmond_dantes 13y ago
      Until that information is associated with you when you pass through the POS and pay for your goods.
      - superuser2 13y ago
        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.
  - nairteashop 13y ago
    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.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      "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?)
      - nairteashop 13y ago
        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 :)
    - pbsdp 13y ago
      Sure there is. Remember how your iPhone had to be activated with the carrier? Or how all that analytics software would use the MAC either as a UDID, or to derive one?
    - bilbo0s 13y ago
      Actually, there is. 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. Of course... that may be all they need.
- tmzt 13y ago
  How are they doing this if the device isn't associating with an access point or broadcasting beacons?
  - nairteashop 13y ago
    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.
    - darxius 13y ago
      Is there a way to disable this?
      - nairteashop 13y ago
        As far as I know, the only way to disable the WiFi "pings" is to turn off WiFi on your device when you don't need it.
        darxius 13y ago
        Cool, thanks.
        bigiain 13y ago
        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…)
throwaway420 13y ago
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.
- cheald 13y ago
  > 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.
nairteashop 13y ago
(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.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  aha - unique MAC address. Thank you - that beats facial recognition. I was wondering why. HN: a thermometer for frogs in nearly boiling water.

nness 13y ago

I don't particularly see an issue with this, but I welcome any insights to convince me otherwise. You have no expectation of privacy when in public. My question is whether there is any difference to someone following you around a mall as you go through your shopping journey (whether with cameras or in person even), as compared to someone following your phone?

obituary_latte 13y ago
Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.
- joonix 13y ago
  So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
  - jevinskie 13y ago
    I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
      - gradstudent 13y ago
        We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

While still in college, one my senior papers involved analysis of patterns of movement in a large local bar/nightclub. The owners had changed the layout of the club several times and were losing money every weekend. After spending time doing some simple observations, I made a few suggestions and after a two week period of implementation, they were making 8-10% more per weekend. I'm always surprised when I see people who are convinced technology can solve their woes when all you need to do is make some observations. No wi-fi tracking will tell you there's a huge clearance rack blocking your view of several other items. It also won't tell you if a merchandise row is so narrow only one person can stand in front of a display. Technology is great, but in most retail or commercial environment's, you still need feet on the ground.

mgurlitz 13y ago
It doesn't make sense for Nordstrom to hire a consultant for each underperforming store -- they can save money and make better decisions by using data collection technology. Anyone could go to a retailer on a slow afternoon, see open registers with no one in line, and determine that they could save money by having fewer cashiers. But having the data allows the company make those decisions with much more confidence.
- chrischen 13y ago
  Exactly. Wifi tracking is built into enterprise wifi systems like meraki or aerohive. It's basically already there, so it's going to be way cheaper to implement than having dedicated people eyeballing every store constantly.
- bennyg 13y ago
  There's a TON of intangibles that this data absolutely cannot tell you. Watch people's facial expressions as they look at the end of aisle displays. Watch where the kids go, and you can probably sell to their parents there too. Everyone wants to automate around here, and sometimes the other way is actually better.
- VLM 13y ago
  The TLDR is its risk avoidance. If it doesn't work, and decisions were made by people, then people, and the people who hired their services are to blame. On the other hand, if decisions were made by numbers, and it doesn't work, no one is to blame, what are you going to do, fire the number 7.356 ?

gojomo 13y ago

To opt out, before entering a store, turn off your phone and put on a ski mask. "Are you here to rob us?" "No, I'm just opting out of your facial-tracking systems. Which way to kitchen appliances?"

otibom 13y ago
Ironically if you're the only guy with a ski mask you're not hard to track.
- tokipin 13y ago
  we should go the route of the Three Amigos' Amigos Amigos Amigos strategy
scrrr 13y ago
There's a business opportunity. Rent-a-shopper. Anonymize your purchases by having another person do your shopping. Pick up your purchases at a rent-a-shopper pick up point near you. I wonder what percentage of the population cares about being profiled though. Less than 5%? It's a niche business opportunity.
- adrianb 13y ago
  Why would I trust the rent-a-shopper pick-up point? They might be tracking me as well. Once started, paranoia goes all the way.
- endersshadow 13y ago
  Task Rabbit already does this, ostensibly. We have people go to Ikea for us because screw going to Ikea.

jlgaddis 13y ago

Who's going to build the mobile application that monitors the user's location (via GPS) and automatically sets the wireless NIC's MAC address to a specific value whenever the user is near one of these stores (and isn't connected to a real wireless network)? Surely having a handful of shoppers who all have the same MAC address in one store at one time would screw up their analysis a little bit, no? It would certainly make it much more difficult to track a specific individual.

informatimago 13y ago
MAC addresses are unique, unless hacked.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  That's kinda the point of setting everyone's to the same value.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

How does wifi tracking work? How do you do directional finding? I assume they cannot have a thousand access points per store? Frankly I would assume using computer vision to track heads like molecules in Brownian motion would be cheaper simpler in all cases. However this one creeps me out far more than NSA. Odd really

rwg 13y ago
You don't need a super-dense AP deployment for location tracking of clients to work. A client that's actively looking for networks to join will occasionally broadcast a probe request frame on all of the channels it can transmit on, trying to get nearby access points to respond. If you have at least three access points that "hear" the same probe request and you know where those access points are located, you can use the position information of the access points combined with the received signal strength of the probe request frame at each access point to compute that client's position.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  It still sounds unlikely without working it through. I guess the inverse power law applies, and signals are pretty weak to start with, so differences of a few metres will make a big drop. How accurate are these systems (someone implied it came as standard on certain APs)? what is the density for say 50cm resolution - any papers on this? thank you
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    just a quick follow up - I noticed that "is sounds unlikely" is doubting your statement - I am sure the directional / location of wifi is pretty accurate - its just my intuition about such things is so wildly off I would need to do some cacls on signal strength over metres of distance. Interesting thanks

Houshalter 13y ago

I'm not as disturbed by them tracking their customers (I mean they've always had cameras in stores and recorded all your purchases anyways), as I am to the amount of effort and efficiency that goes into maximizing the amount of stuff they sell people. Like putting the milk in the back of the store so you see 50 other things on the way that you also might want to get, or putting ".99" at the end of the price tag to abuse our inability to estimate numbers. It's the same tricks basically, just far more efficient. Making the optimal store layouts so customers spend as much time inside as possible or get exposed to as many other items as possible. Use machine learning algorithms to set the prices so every price is as high as it can be before people stop buying it entirely.

bad_user 13y ago
Meh, these same tricks have always backfired. Yes, they've been placing food/beverages at the back since years ago. This also means that customers that are in a hurry to buy bread/food/milk/whatever are more likely to go to their local grocery store. As we, the customers, may be stupid enough to buy into their .99 tricks, but we aren't so stupid as to not notice that it took 3 hours to buy milk or bread, as many times you're really not in the mood to gape at useless shit. It's interesting though that local grocery stores are not so common in the U.S., compared to Europe. To get food, I only need to cross the street. Also, setting the prices dynamically will not work in an online world. What if customers had a mobile app with which they could compare prices with other retailers just by scanning the bar code? Again, customers aren't so stupid - they may not notice that the price of individual items has gone up, but they do notice fluctuations in their monthly spending.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  I can testify that the milk trick does work, at least with my own family. They say they will promise to only spend a minute getting milk and end up buying a bunch of other groceries as well. Dynamic price setting works because people are not perfect rational actors that compare every single item they look at to the lowest price in town. I don't know if anyone does that actually. People might notice a bigger shopping bill, but they are more likely to attribute it to buying more than slightly higher prices on every single item, which they might not even notice. In any case they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make them more money.

Amadou 13y ago

But while consumers seem to have no problem with cookies, profiles and other online tools that let e-commerce sites know who they are and how they shop, some bristle at the physical version That is a profoundly ignorant statement to make - the vast majority of web users have no concept of the scope at which they are being tracked online. If there was a sign spelling out all the trackers on every web page like there was a sign in the store, you can be sure a whole lot more people would be "bristling."

llamataboot 13y ago
Every friend I have gotten to install ghostery has been pretty shocked.

dm2 13y ago

Here is a video about the Euclid software. This service makes the Wifi tracking even scarier because it can track across different stores, then they probably sell that data. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4W1GIRHC_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4W1GIRHC_4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86DxCqfHjY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k86DxCqfHjY Here is a way to opt-out of this particular service. https://signup.euclidelements.com/optout https://signup.euclidelements.com/optout It seems like it would be trivial to tie in the location tracking with the products someone purchases and if you are using a rewards card (like most grocery stores have) then the store has all of your information tied to your MAC address. It's not just stores, any place could have these systems set up. Malls, airports, stadiums, schools, or even your workplace. Is it possible to obscure or modify a phones wifi strength when not connected to a network to prevent this tracking?

pdx 13y ago
I just watched the video. They mention that they use equipment from http://www.aerohive.com/ http://www.aerohive.com/, which just seem to be normal wifi infrastructure. It seems like only people who actually connect to the wifi can be tracked. There's no way to harvest the MAC address of a wifi device that hasn't connected to your network, is there? As a store, this seems to be not that valuable to me. I can't imagine that very many shoppers actually take the time from shopping to decide to connect to your wifi. I get that they only need to do this once, and after that, it will auto-reconnect. I'm still not buying it as an effective tracking method.
- napoleond 13y ago
  There's no way to harvest the MAC address of a wifi device that hasn't connected to your network, is there? Yes, there is. If you set your WLAN interface to monitor mode and run tcpdump or similar, you can look at packets passing by, even if you're not connected to a network at all. I built a Wifi tracking system this way when I was in school.
  - pdx 13y ago
    Thanks for that. I wanted to understand how this was working. This seems like a pretty powerful data source to use for all sorts of things, if it's always accessible like that. A world readable cookie for every yuppie and hipster on the planet!

16s 13y ago

Were it not for their name, "Cookies" would not be generally accepted. We should have named them "Roaches", then no one would say, well it's just a roach.

p6rny 13y ago

can Google be doing this to the whole city where they provide free WIFI for the city?

waster 13y ago

So at the cost of usability (for the cell user), wouldn't a product (or homemade solution: Hello, tin foil!) that blocks RFID/wifi signals wrapped around the phone also foil (ouch) this tracking? I'm thinking something like Blokket (http://howsyourrobot.com/2012/09/26/blokket-blocks-rfid-wifi-signals/ http://howsyourrobot.com/2012/09/26/blokket-blocks-rfid-wifi... - I have no direct knowledge of this product, BTW; just googled RFID/wifi blocking). Obviously this won't work for facial recognition, but I see that's discussed in other comments.