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Swarm Mobile's Offer: Free Wi-Fi In Exchange For Some Privacy

Posted by timothy on from the tradeoffs-tradeoffs dept.

cagraham writes "Startup Swarm Mobile intends to help physical retailers counter online shopping habits by collecting data on their customer's actions. Swarm's platform integrates with store's Wifi networks in order to monitor what exactly customers are doing while shopping. In exchange for collecting analytics, shoppers get access to free internet. Swarm then send reports to the store owners, detailing how many customers checked prices online, or compared rival products on their phones. Their platform also allows stores to directly send discount codes or coupons to shopper's phones."

5 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Die in a fire by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your stupid mind control techniques don't need more information from spying on us, they need to go away forever.

  2. Those who would by oodaloop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Whose who would exchange privacy for a little internet access deserve neither.

    --
    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    1. Re:Those who would by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who are you to tell me what information I should voluntarily provide or for what reasons I should provide it?

      This isn't the government snooping on my online activities and denying it. This is me willfully entering into an agreement with a service provider.

  3. Tough ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's things like this why the wifi on my phone is disabled when I'm not using it, and why I don't have a data plan.

    Measure that bitches. Because I'm sure as hell not providing you with the information.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. Re:Bring it on! by mlts · · Score: 3, Insightful

    VPNs should be a matter of course for anyone using Wi-Fi (barring their home/work networks, of course.) FireSheep type attacks are not as big an attack as in the past, but there are still things one can do, be it Phorm-like modification of HTTP streams in flight (perhaps injecting malware) to DNS hijacking (and there are people who will completely ignore the obvious SSL warnings and proceed no matter what, even stashing the bogus key in their root cert pool.)

    VPNs are not perfect. However, having traffic slowed or stopped is a less of an issue than having it modified in flight or just plain snooped.