IoT Network Watches You as You Shop – Without Cameras
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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.).
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.
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.)
As someone with bluetooth development experience, no they are nowhere nearly that accurate in real life. You can take your tinfoil hat off.
Not saying alphabet agencies or military contractors can't build Bluetooth triangulation devices with high accuracy, but most beacons in the retail industry suck major balls not just in specs but more importantly they're almost always installed by contractors who have no idea about RF (antenna position and materials of nearby objects matter a lot) so the data they receive is almost always garbage.
1) Regardless of what they might think, I would hope they let customers know they were being observed and tracked.
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.
> With only vibration and light, there simply is nothing there to identify individual shoppers.
Their approach seems to have some privacy merit, but I'm a little discouraged to see claims that appear to be salespersonship, not engineering nor science.
In addition to what you pointed out (and possibly also correlating "anonymized" shopper with cameras at checkout and/or entryways), I'd also be a little curious about what all is picked up by the vibration sensors. Can they sense steps/gait/shoes at all? Any qualities of voice?
And, hypothetically, even if the sensors in the current version could really only detect touching of the product, no matter how much signal processing and ML one throws at it, what happens when there's B2B sales incentive to disambiguate movement of individual shoppers, or to link them to identifying info with more accuracy than currently, and quietly upgrading the vibration sensor would enable that?
Some start up will productize this offline B&M tracking, and then some Tech Giant will snatch them up and hoover that data. And so on.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
The extra privacy-stealing step is in the identification 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)
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.
Smart store managers would indeed do this. But they also don't need unreliable electronics to tell them what they know from walking around the store.
> 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.
1) Grocery stores are optimized to hell and back already since the margins are so terribly thin. Industrial engineers have been over every shelf and aisle several times already.
2) Grocery stores have seem to have reoptimized roughly about 2-3 years ago. It seems like all the grocery chains suddenly remodeled and converged on a new layout.
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.
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.
I would similarly bet that people will readily exchange their purchase history for discounts/convenience. Even I find it convenient to not have to save every receipt for returning items and just be able to enter my phone number.
/me: "Abärr isch abäh gaa kainäh Ändieh!"
Also I see more and more shops which stopped asking. Finally.
mostly: Tegut, REWE, Lidl. Other than that: Bauhaus, IKEA, Bäckereien.
Though I changed my shopping to early morning, just before going to sleep, instead of "last minute shopping" before closing, after getting up late. So I'm a new face to most cashiers. Idea is less virus load after a night with no people and aircon having sucked it away. I'd hope. Can't say anything about IKEA or Bauhaus atm. Haven't been there for years. Didn't need to. Bakery? KNÄCKEBROT!
edit: But asking for some points collection scheme seems to be the default here, except for Aldi. And at least about half of the people do it.
I've noticed that this is mostly down to the cashier recognizing you and not some kind of policy change.
At my regular EDEKA some of the cashiers know me and know I don't do points collection, so they usually don't ask but sometimes still do just out of habit.
Cashiers that don't know me will still always ask.
Another EDEKA, where I only shop every couple of weeks and nobody recognizes me, I always get asked for the card.
I just tell the cashier's I forgot my card. They just grab one off the stack and scan it.
This, of course, depends where you are. Randalls requires the card/phone number and the cashier won't even prompt you for it; you have to type in the number on the pinpad or hand them your card before paying.
I recently moved away from central TX where HEB is prevalent and that's one of the things I miss the most- they don't use any of this card nonsense and treat their employees well. Up here I'm stuck with Kroger and Walmart.
Of course, I'd prefer not to provide a phone number at all, but some of the local businesses (especially hair salons, for some reason) get downright hostile when I try to explain my preference. It's like it's completely unheard of to not hand your phone number out to strangers. This gives me a way to "relent" without causing a scene.
In many cases, privacy is lost simply as a side effect of some specific desire which can 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.
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.
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.
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...
This is more like an upgraded version the traffic counters with pneumatic hoses that have been used to count road traffic for many decades. they know how many vehicles go by (actually, how many axles), and when, but no idea who, but it still provides valuable information to the planners (I sometimes wondered if they were sufficiently sensitive to count bicycles).