Retail Stores Plan Elaborate Ways To Track You

Velcroman1 writes "Retailers are experimenting with a variety of new ways to track you, so that when you pick up a shirt, you might get a message about the matching shorts. Or pick up golf shoes at a sports store and you see a discount for a new set of clubs. New technologies like magnetic field detection, Bluetooth Low Energy, sonic pulses, and even transmissions from the in-store lights can tell when you enter a store, where you go, and how you shop. Just last year, tracking was only accurate within 100 feet. Starting this year, they can track within a few feet. ByteLight makes the lighting tech, which transmits a unique signal that the camera in your phone can read. The store can then track your location within about 3 feet — and it's already in use at the Museum of Science in Boston."

Minority Report

[jamstar7]

Sounds like that movie, Minority Report, when Tom Cruise went into that store with his new eyes and the hologram asked him "How are those Dockers working out for you?

Interesting Submitter

[guttentag]

The submitter, Velcroman1, has submitted hundreds of stories [slashdot.org] since October 2009, all of which link to Foxnews.com, but only five comments in the last two years... just one this year so far.

Even more interesting is that stories submitted by MarkWhittington come up on Velcroman1's slashdot page as if they were Velcroman1's submissions... If you look at MarkWhittington's slashdot page [slashdot.org], all of his submissions link to his own articles or opinion pieces on voices.yahoo.com or examiner.com. ALL of them. And also no comments. MarkWhittington apparently contributes his own content to these sites as a freelancer and submits them to slashdot to drive traffic.

On page 2 [slashdot.org] of Velcroman1's slashdot profile Nerval's Lobster ([e-mail], [e-mail]) submissions start to show up. We've [slashdot.org] already [slashdot.org] established [slashdot.org] that Nerval's Lobster is Nick Kolakowski, a slashdot employee submitting paid content as user-submitted stories...

It would be interesting to see what percentage of published slashdot stories are genuinely submitted by people who have no financial interest in the submission.