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How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You
An anonymous reader writes Big-box retailers are figuring out how to use mobile apps to drive in-store sales, but they're also concerned about privacy. To see how they're doing, Xconomy took Target's app for a spin on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The app uses indoor location-mapping technology from a startup called Point Inside. The verdict? The app saved a few minutes in locating items around the store, but it would work better if it knew where shoppers (and the items on their lists) are at any time. With Apple's iBeacons set to roll out more widely, retail privacy will be a hot issue in 2015.
They even already have customer traffic profiling in Europe (which is usually a year or two, at least, behind the US in tech). https://business.styloola.com/
What matters is not if an app can tell where you are in the store, but if and when the app shares that information with a server. I don't care what information an application collects, if the data stays in-app.
Of course the great likelihood is that an app that collects that information will probably send that to a server, at the very least to query for specifics around you... but a smart app developer could provide a privacy option for users while still gaining benefit from iBeacons and the like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's no reason to shop at a retailer unless you're desperate and need something now. Even the more overpriced online retailers kill brick and mortar on price. Local retailers are closing left and right near me. The mall, which had a 3 lane exit built for it just a few years ago because lines to the parking lot would block the interstate around the holidays, is now a ghost town. Back in the 1990's they kicked out any retailer that wasn't trendy like The Gap or Banana republic, so the stores that made the mall interesting are gone. Radioshack is nothing more than a cellphone kiosk now. Now those interesting retailers have moved to our long vacant downtown (ironically killed off by the mall!) Those unique boutique shops are the only way retail will survive the next 5 to 10yrs and you can guarantee location tracking is the last thing on their minds.
Retailed killed itself, and this "Surveillance" is just a further example of how they just don't get it.
I don't need to be tracked. All I want to know is where stuff is. I really like Home Depot's website, anytime I need to buy stuff there I make a list, look it up with prices and aisle/shelf info, cut--n-paste it all into an email that I send from my desktop to my phone. It is sooo much of a time saver that I find myself not even considering going to Lowes because they don't have location info on their website. Now, if only I could figure out how to make the home depot location stuff work without having to disable ghostery and requestpolicy.
Walmart's smartphone app has similar location info, but it isn't available on their website which I find personally insulting. Like they choose to deliberately make me waste time because I don't want to be data-mined. It would be one thing if it cost them extra to provide that data, but they obviously have it and are just choosing to not share it. Plus, I'm now old enough to need reading glasses and so few apps are able to zoom up in a way that lets me read all the details without glasses. Ignorant 20-something designers don't even realize they are pushing customers away.
Inside their store if I had installed their app to help me buy their stuff
Of course, if this was fry's telling geeks how to find their on sale hard drives faster so they can store more porn and pirated movies it would be so awesome
But this is target
Welcome to the end of the personal computer era. In the future, none of your programs will be able to run without connecting to a server somewhere, sometime.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
1) The /. article is titled: "How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You" (highlight mine).
Yet the article and the conclusion is that this app doesn't track you because of hyper sensitivity to privacy, even though their experience and most surveyed users WANT that feature. So, clickbait headline or didn't you even RTFA yourselves?
2) "I have an aversion to shopping in general, and large-format retail in particular. While I think I have a strong sense of direction most of the time, put me inside of a big box store with its scores of aisles and the sometimes impenetrable logic of its layout, and I get turned around and frustrated right quick. I tend to avoid this kind of shopping, opting instead for the convenience of online purchases or smaller bricks-and-mortar stores that Iâ(TM)m familiar with or that offer a more curated experience." OK, we know you're a condescending douche, got it. We understand that you don't go to these sorts of places, probably because you're tragically hip. Editors at Xconomy: asleep at the switch? Maybe cull out this sort of patronizing crap from reviews?
-Styopa
Shut your phone off and pay cash... you fucking sheep.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
On Andorid. Root, install Xposed framework. install Xprivacy from the Xposed repository and enjoy fine grain control to app permissions.
iBeacon helps your phone find itself and thus you. It doesn't let others map your phone.
A merchant could make a system which finds you using iBeacon by self reporting. That is your phone finds itself and then an app on your phone tells the merchant. So if you want to find yourself, you can using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't. If you want the retailer to know where you are, you run their app which reports your location using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't.
The other kinds of systems which track your WiFi signal around the store, where you are tracked without opting in, those are more likely to create privacy issues. Target already uses these kinds of systems.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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The app will detect when you know what product you want and inform store associates to harass you and ask if you need any help... ...and detect when you're lost and tell the employees it's their lunch break.
Most stores don't want to minimize your time in the story. I think they want to maximize the time you spend near high-margin impulse-buy items, and up-sells of the items you originally intended to buy.
If I was a sleazy developer of software like this, and especially if I had access to the customer's whole shopping list, I'd send them on a pretty different path than their ideal one.
In the book The Power of Habit, Target is an example of how a company can already track you and your buying habits to the point of knowing when a woman is pregnant long before she herself knows. Some women have discovered they were pregnant only after receiving targeted discount coupons for formula and disposable diapers.
Now they want to track you via an app too? Will it extend to what you do outside of target stores?
As my grandchildren are likely to say: "Privacy? Whazzat?"