I don't see the privacy issue here. They're just measuring physical activity per quadrant. They can use it to study which products and product areas seem to be attracting the most interest. They specifically don't use photography or wifi that follows people around.<p>Although the vibration/light sensors are a somewhat novel idea, in the end a retailer already knows exactly what products are sold, in what quantities, which ones are returned, and (anecdotally at least) which ones spark the most questions from shoppers. It's not long in coming before UHF RFID chips will show the products being carried around the store (or out the back door, etc.).<p>Probably this system would be most useful for determining which products are "hot" and should be moved to an end cap or special display near the entrance. Or they might choose to "bury" the products to force shoppers to walk past tempting tangential items.<p>Retailing is a science, perfected over many decades. The lights, the music, even the aromas, all conspire to influence shoppers in ways that online can't compete with. I wonder if retail in fact will eventually find a formula to outcompete the online folks. (I'm still kicking myself for ordering a Pi Zero W online when I could have driven the same day to the Microcenter and picked one up.)
> "This is why we chose vibration sensors and light sensors. No liability from owning any personally identifiable information."<p>1) Regardless of what they might think, I would hope they let customers know they were being observed and tracked.<p>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.
I'm not sure what the big deal about 'without cameras' is - I would imagine that most areas of a store are already covered by security cameras, so every customer is being recorded already.<p>The extra privacy-stealing step is in the <i>identification</i> of shoppers, and that is being done without cameras, using techniques like device fingerprinting (as the article says, some stores do this via their free wifi)
I'd like to understand how the data harvested from these devices is actually used. So it is essentially showing the busy areas in the store and areas that are not receiving as much traffic. Wouldn't that be also reflected in sales data (i.e. items in low traffic areas have less sales volume?), which is maybe why they're there in the first place...?<p>How is this type of data actionable. Is there a team of middle managers that looks at this type of data and decides to continue rearranging their stores? It seems like the product layouts in my local grocery stores have hardly changed in the last decade, so I think I must be missing the point here.
Seems like there might be at least a cottage industry in small wearable devices that would foil this kind of thing.<p>Though, extending this thought experiment a bit, if you asked the average shopper how much they would pay for such a device, I’d imagine the most common answer would be nothing, since the average shopper cannot perceive the cost to them of this surveillance.<p>Which in turn suggests that maybe a better countermeasure would be some way to show consumers what those costs to them are, in estimated dollars.
Can someone here build a radar/sonar based home surveillance that works at any time of day & also maybe aid in capturing/targeting actual robbers faces when someone enters a property? Such a device could easily be camouflaged to avoid detection/destruction as well.
This system is cool, because it is battery powered. On the other hand, decent 3D sensor can also monitor the interaction between product and customer much better. And also track the customer’s movements in the store during whole shopping tour.
I think that aspects such as this are going to be the main results of GDPR-like legislation in various places.<p>In many cases, privacy is lost simply as a side effect of some specific desire which <i>can</i> be fulfilled respectfully, but the invasive methods are simpler or cheaper, so in the absence of any regulation that gets chosen - but we can easily do better if we (as the society) choose to.
Why are marketers so obsessed with collecting data on their customers? It seems so absurd.<p>On the one hand, they come up with ridiculous surveilance tech like this to track everything their customers do in their stores, so they can better understand how to sell crap to their customers.<p>On the other hand these big stores hire the least experienced, cheapest staff that they can find. If they just hired actual sales people and made sure that enough employees were around the store to talk to customers, nobody would need surveillance tech to find out what customers want.<p>But I guess automation is everything, and the goal is to have a store that doesn't depend on their employees. Why bother hiring experienced sales people for every store when you can get away with a handful of marketers that automatically analyze customer data of hundreds of stores...
Yet another reason to avoid retailers now. They generally can’t compete on price, haven’t tried for years. Now they want to monitor me in ever more insidious ways? It’s creepy and this data will all eventually be sold and aggregated by the data brokers.