Nestle's GPS Tracking Candy Campaign

colinneagle writes "In a cool yet creepy marketing campaign, Nestle plans to stalk UK consumers. The company kicked off a unique promotion called 'We will find you' that involves GPS trackers embedded in chocolate bars. When a winning consumer opens the wrapper, it activates and notifies the prize team who promises to track them down within 24 hours to deliver a check for £10,000. A Nestle spokesman added that 'inside their wrappers, the GPS-enabled bars looked just like normal chocolate bars.'"

GPS Trackers

[smi.james.th]

Anyone who's ever used a GPS, especially not a dedicated device e.g. a smartphone, knows that it's a bit of a mission to get the thing to actually lock on to sattelites. If one was really paranoid one could just carry one's chocolate in a metal box until one gets home, then the GPS will never lock on anyway. So I doubt there are any real privacy implications here...

Baby milk

[Threni]

Any chance of a promotion to track down the parents of kids who've died in the third world due to the heavy, illegal promition of powdered milk there?

Re:Metal detector?

[Immerman]

I doubt it's that big a trick - if I were asked to make the tracker I'd give it something like an RFID tag that draws power from mobile-phone or WiFi band EM radiation, from which it will be shielded so long as the foil is in place. Once opened the RFID would then power up and trip a transistor or SCR that switches on the battery-powered tracker that would then phone home at regular intervals. Until the foil is opened and RFID powered up the battery circuit would be open, preventing both charge loss and the tell-tale signal leaking through the foil.