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Retail Stores Plan Elaborate Ways To Track You
Velcroman1 writes "Retailers are experimenting with a variety of new ways to track you, so that when you pick up a shirt, you might get a message about the matching shorts. Or pick up golf shoes at a sports store and you see a discount for a new set of clubs. New technologies like magnetic field detection, Bluetooth Low Energy, sonic pulses, and even transmissions from the in-store lights can tell when you enter a store, where you go, and how you shop. Just last year, tracking was only accurate within 100 feet. Starting this year, they can track within a few feet. ByteLight makes the lighting tech, which transmits a unique signal that the camera in your phone can read. The store can then track your location within about 3 feet — and it's already in use at the Museum of Science in Boston."
Which means, this is just another good reason not to use a Bluetooth headset! Really, I can imagine a headset being of use in, say, a car--where you need to focus on the road/wheel and holding something up to your ear is just dumb (but let's face it--humans won't stop being morons until they're all dead). But outside of a car setting, I really don't see what the point is in having such a system--and even then, what's wrong with speakerphone? In a store, maybe you get some minor convenience being able to look at shit and bullshit at the same time while having two free hands, but in that case why didn't you drag the person on the other end of the phone line in the store with you to begin with? And I'm having a hard time even thinking of a reason that these two uses--car and stores--are valid alternatives to just waiting to call later.
So... save your battery, fuck Bluetooth, and fuck these stores' tracking. With years of fighting the scumbags and assholes in the web/online advertisement industry and more recently the extreme backlash on the U.S. government for their mass surveillance programs, you'd think these dipshits would eventually get the fucking point. But no--they never do, because they will stop at nothing to get even more from you.