Cell tracking in the mall?
Starting on Black Friday two malls in the US – Promenade Temecula in Southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that’s collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers’ paths from store to store.
From a information standpoint this could be interesting, albeit with a lot of noise. User’s are tracked via a unique identifier on their phone. Although the use of the data is anonymous, there is the potential that this location information can be tied to your personal info – name and cell phone number for example.
The cell phone carriers like T-Mobile and ATT track tons of this information already, so this is nothing new (theirs goes pretty deep – they can tie your location, data usage, purchasing, credit card, etc. together – and they are trying to figure out how to monetize all of this.)
So the question is: is this just another step towards us losing all privacy online, or are we kidding ourselves that it ever actually existed? And is this moving beyond purely digital now that our motions in the real-world are being tracked?
Check out the GigaOM post for more details.
