>I think this activity should be regulated and should be an opt-in thing for users.
I think any possible regulatory hurdles that could be imagined will make life for anyone who does anything neat with wifi or some other combination of information miserable. The credit card thing makes me wonder.. like what exactly are they grabbing? Just the fact that a card swipe was recorded at the same time that X wifi radio was in front of the register?
Somehow I'm still not bothered by this. As long as there's no "hidden" information being exposed (say, my CC#), my response is a big fat "meh". Combining different kinds of public information (as in, things that any person could just walk by and see) doesn't somehow combine to become private information.
I mean, let's see what pieces of data we're dealing with here:
* Entry to the store. Public. Via CCTV, door sensor, etc.
* Items selected. Public-ish. (Recorded after checkout, some stores use RFID tagging)
* Location in the store. Public. (Anyone can see.)
* Time card was swiped. Public. (Anyone in line can see)
* Basic WiFi information (Mac address, SSID, etc). Public. (Anyone with a smartphone can see.)
Given the fact that all of these pieces of information are freely available, I find it impossible to call for someone's head or feel even vagely "creeped out" by simply combining that info.
Put yet another way, the information's always been there in the open, but now that someone decides to collect it, there's a problem??
To be clear, we're not collecting credit card data / swipes. Just anonymous movement. There's been some discussion about eventually using in-store payment systems with open API's to marry purchasing behavior to foot traffic >> but this wouldn't be tied to the individual.
The goal is not individual (person) tracking. The goal is identifying and operationalizing trends at an location-specific and network level.
We encourage users worried about privacy to opt out. But realistically, they're not individuals to the system. They're part of a trend.
As long as we get a statistically relevant percentage of movement (15-20%) we believe we can still be useful to the business. Worst case: a lot of people opt out, we drop from our current 60-70% capture to 20-30% capture and we simply extrapolate the remainder.
It's an inexact science but, we believe, very useful.
Thank you for the clarification. I think the NSA shenanigans and everything surrounding them have people hypersensitive with regard to any kind of "tracking", no matter how innocuous.
I think any possible regulatory hurdles that could be imagined will make life for anyone who does anything neat with wifi or some other combination of information miserable. The credit card thing makes me wonder.. like what exactly are they grabbing? Just the fact that a card swipe was recorded at the same time that X wifi radio was in front of the register?
Somehow I'm still not bothered by this. As long as there's no "hidden" information being exposed (say, my CC#), my response is a big fat "meh". Combining different kinds of public information (as in, things that any person could just walk by and see) doesn't somehow combine to become private information.
I mean, let's see what pieces of data we're dealing with here:
Given the fact that all of these pieces of information are freely available, I find it impossible to call for someone's head or feel even vagely "creeped out" by simply combining that info.Put yet another way, the information's always been there in the open, but now that someone decides to collect it, there's a problem??