How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You 61
An anonymous reader writes Big-box retailers are figuring out how to use mobile apps to drive in-store sales, but they're also concerned about privacy. To see how they're doing, Xconomy took Target's app for a spin on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The app uses indoor location-mapping technology from a startup called Point Inside. The verdict? The app saved a few minutes in locating items around the store, but it would work better if it knew where shoppers (and the items on their lists) are at any time. With Apple's iBeacons set to roll out more widely, retail privacy will be a hot issue in 2015.
Already in Europe too (Score:1)
They even already have customer traffic profiling in Europe (which is usually a year or two, at least, behind the US in tech). https://business.styloola.com/ [styloola.com]
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Europe, Japan, Korea, etc passed the USA for most tech a while ago. The USA is no longer the latest and greatest but instead go for cheap knock offs.
Generations of paying people bottom dollar for hard work and top dollar for doing nothing.
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Europe, Japan, Korea, etc passed the USA for most tech a while ago. The USA is no longer the latest and greatest but instead go for cheap knock offs.
Generations of paying people bottom dollar for hard work and top dollar for doing nothing.
Asia, sure, could be. But no way is Europe ahead of the US in tech. There was an Internet tech conference in Paris this year where they had a session that was literally just telling stories about what those crazy amazing businesses in California were doing with the Internet. Like paying with PayPal at the cashier!!! ATM's that email you!
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Europe, Japan, Korea, etc passed the USA for most tech a while ago. The USA is no longer the latest and greatest but instead go for cheap knock offs.
Oh? Please show me a country in western Europe where I can order online and pickup in the store!
Privacy indépendant from beacons (Score:4, Informative)
What matters is not if an app can tell where you are in the store, but if and when the app shares that information with a server. I don't care what information an application collects, if the data stays in-app.
Of course the great likelihood is that an app that collects that information will probably send that to a server, at the very least to query for specifics around you... but a smart app developer could provide a privacy option for users while still gaining benefit from iBeacons and the like.
Re:Privacy independant from beacons (Score:3)
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These apps, fitness tracking apps, car monitoring apps, they all COULD work just fine without uploading everything to the vendor's server. But now, vendors have the belief that you didn't pay enough when you purchase merchandise from them. You need to further monetized, by selling information about you to other companies.
yea no (Score:3)
There's no reason to shop at a retailer unless you're desperate and need something now. Even the more overpriced online retailers kill brick and mortar on price. Local retailers are closing left and right near me. The mall, which had a 3 lane exit built for it just a few years ago because lines to the parking lot would block the interstate around the holidays, is now a ghost town. Back in the 1990's they kicked out any retailer that wasn't trendy like The Gap or Banana republic, so the stores that made the mall interesting are gone. Radioshack is nothing more than a cellphone kiosk now. Now those interesting retailers have moved to our long vacant downtown (ironically killed off by the mall!) Those unique boutique shops are the only way retail will survive the next 5 to 10yrs and you can guarantee location tracking is the last thing on their minds.
Retailed killed itself, and this "Surveillance" is just a further example of how they just don't get it.
Re: yea no (Score:1)
Obviously you haven't shopped at best buy or toys r us lately. They kill Amazon on price and selection
Re: yea no (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously you haven't shopped at best buy or toys r us lately. They kill Amazon on price and selection
So Best Buys Book section is better than Amazons? And their Jewelry? Cutlery? Clothing?
Oh wait, they don't have any of that stuff... I'd better go check Toys R Us... lol
And on price? Yes, I have been to Best Buy lately... I went to get a network cable to replace a broken one. It was $29.99 for a single cable. They had much cheaper ones on their website but they're not available locally. And the cables they had at the store weren't listed on the website.
So I suspect you're comparing their websites... ok... but that's basically the same service. The store has entirely different products and different prices and it's worthless.
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book, i buy kindle
i would never buy expensive jewelry from amazon. my wife buys some cheapo stuff from B&M because you can touch it and look at it and it's nice to take a walk sometimes.
Cutlery?, i have had the same knives i bought from Williams and Sonoma for the last 10 years
clothing, B&M since it's easier to return it if it doesn't fit but my wife buys kid's shoes online and not from amazon because they are too expensive
i'll buy blu rays from best buy because i can do it on the way home from wor
Re: yea no (Score:1)
You can buy cat-5 and cat-6 by the foot @ Lowes (and Home Depot), the connectors and crimping tool can be had for cheap and are basically one-time expenses. Why would you go to Best Buy or Amazon for such a thing?
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This is basically what I did long ago although I prefer stranded cable. One thing to watch out for is that the cheap plastic crimpers have a tenancy to crack leading to unreliable crimp connections. For about $50 you can get a much better crimper like a Greenlee 45553 which I have or Paladin Tools 1545 or 1387.
Re:yea no (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no reason to shop at a retailer unless you're desperate and need something now
Sometimes it's actually nice to fondle the merchandise. There's only so much you can get out of an online catalog, especially since the pictures are usually pretty poor.
I was beginning to believe the Radio Shack mantra, until I wandered into my neighborhood store the other day. They had an impressive array of sensors and kits for stand-alone, Rasberry Pi, Basic Stamp and Arduino, as well as the aforementioned systems themselves. Also the LittleBits stuff, including the Korg synth.
Plus essential cables, connectors and adapters, various useful batteries for UPS's, alarm systems and Roomba.
Oh yeah. And cell phones. And a handful of TVs.
And a whole rack full of soldering irons. And the parts cases.
So they're not quite as useless as they've been made out to be.
As for price, I'm not so impoverished that getting the Low Price Always is the overriding criteria for my purchasing decisions.
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I was beginning to believe the Radio Shack mantra, until I wandered into my neighborhood store the other day. They had an impressive array of sensors and kits for stand-alone, Rasberry Pi, Basic Stamp and Arduino, as well as the aforementioned systems themselves. Also the LittleBits stuff, including the Korg synth.
They made some effort to get on the Maker bandwagon a few years ago. I think it's only now starting to pay off, where the geeks (like me) are discovering that they actually have some interesting stuff again. Sure, you'll pay a few bucks more than web-order, but you'll get it right away, even on a Sunday. But then again, there's a Fry's ten minutes from where I live, and just their components section alone puts RS to shame. Silly RS closed the two stores near me (one because the strip mall people wouldn't mo
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That's the difference between mall-located and non-mall Radio Shacks. Go into the Radio Shack in the local mall and they'll have cell phones, HDMI cables, and not much else. Just as well, no one in that store would know what a serial cable or a resistor was.
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> There's no reason to shop at a retailer unless you're desperate and need something now.
I shop brick and mortar because they take cash and they don't ask for my name, address and phone number.
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I shop brick and mortar because they take cash and they don't ask for my name, address and phone number.
It only took RS thirty or so years to get that clue.
Just tell Me Where Stuff is (Score:1)
I don't need to be tracked. All I want to know is where stuff is. I really like Home Depot's website, anytime I need to buy stuff there I make a list, look it up with prices and aisle/shelf info, cut--n-paste it all into an email that I send from my desktop to my phone. It is sooo much of a time saver that I find myself not even considering going to Lowes because they don't have location info on their website. Now, if only I could figure out how to make the home depot location stuff work without having t
omg, a store will know where I am (Score:3)
Inside their store if I had installed their app to help me buy their stuff
Of course, if this was fry's telling geeks how to find their on sale hard drives faster so they can store more porn and pirated movies it would be so awesome
But this is target
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it was horrible on black friday. Target knew I was looking for Lego's when i looked them up on the app in store to check the location. even worse, they tracked me to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aisle that was cleaned out by the time i got there around 9pm
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Next time you're there look for a keyboard with a working shift key.
P.S. There's no plural of Lego, and even if there was it wouldn't have an apostrophe.
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why would i care about Target tracking me through their app inside their store when i'm going to pay by credit card that is in my name anyway?
better they track me so they put stuff i buy up front rather than me having to walk through the whole store
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better they track me so they put stuff i buy up front rather than me having to walk through the whole store
I don't think you understand how they think, they'll put the stuff you buy at the back so that you have to walk through the entire store. In their minds the more stuff you walk past, the more likely you are to buy something on a whim. It's why the milk is always at the back of the grocery store.
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better they track me so they put stuff i buy up front rather than me having to walk through the whole store
You think they'll bring the products you want to the front of the store just because they see that you buy them a lot? That's naively cute. It's also dead wrong.
They want you to walk through the whole store. That's how they convince you to spend more. The 2 items you're there for are almost guaranteed to be at the back of the store, on opposite sides, once they start tracking you, for that very reason. Enjoy.
Of course, they do the same
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and has stopped her from coming home with several-hundred dollar purses on a whim
But does it work for shoes?
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You have to be willing to hold yourself to the PO system, though; you won't know until you try.
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1. Is it on my list of things to buy? If yes, buy it, if not goto 2
2. Is it on sale at a significant reduction? If no, don't buy it. If yes, goto 3
3. Will I need it at some point in the future? If no, don't buy it. If yes, buy it.
It has to be really, really awesome for me to ignore this procedure, simply because I've given away so many impulse buys on sale that I never ended up using.
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The fun of shopping??? The only think that I find fun about shopping is when I have figured out how to get out of doing it. When our nieces were still in town Rosa would go with them and I didn't have to deal with it often, but now they've moved.
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Fry's doesn't care what type of porn you watch. all they have to know is WHO buys the big hard drives and match it up with a few other data points to market to you. stuff like pre ordering digital copies of video games to play them the second they go live and whine about server issues
WTF? (Score:2)
1) The /. article is titled: "How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You" (highlight mine).
Yet the article and the conclusion is that this app doesn't track you because of hyper sensitivity to privacy, even though their experience and most surveyed users WANT that feature. So, clickbait headline or didn't you even RTFA yourselves?
2) "I have an aversion to shopping in general, and large-format retail in particular. While I think I have a strong sense of direction most of the time, put me inside
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> Yet the article and the conclusion is that this app doesn't track you because of hyper sensitivity to privacy,
The problem here is that it is unknowable. Even if they promise not to track people they will always qualify that promise in two ways:
(1) They reserve the right to unilaterally change their mind at any point in the future as long as they publish some fine-print somewhere in a corner of their website
(2) They still track people, but they claim to anonymize the data. Anyone who has been paying a
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Even that I agree with you about what is possible or even likely, doesn't change the fact that the article is patently NOT about "How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You"
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
What kind of person can't navigate a big-box store? The aisles only run front-back or left-right. If you find yourself turned around, just... turn around.
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Maybe he was talking about IKEA. Those stores seem like they are designed after mazes. Whenever I'm in there, I always get lost and can't find my way out. Every other store, though, no problem.
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Wut... IKEA is a single corridor. You keep walking, and you get to the end and leave... It even has arrows on the floor pointing to the way out all the way around. It's literally the single hardest store to get lost in ever.
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1) Following the maze around is trivially easy, and takes 5 minutes at most
2) They provide you with a map, and the locations of shortcuts, which are also trivially easy to find.
Something tells me you're the kind of person who can't manage to follow IKEA's simple instructions to assemble lego^Wfurniture either.
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Probably can't read a map either. I'm amazed at the number of people who can't, even those who grew up before the GPS era. I've worked with people who couldn't stand on the corner of NE 10th Street and 5th Avenue SE and know which way to go to get to NE 18th St and 20th Ave NE. It just astounds me.
retail privacy will be a hot issue in 2015 (Score:2)
Shut your phone off and pay cash... you fucking sheep.
App Permissions (Score:2)
iBeacon isn't a privacy issue alone (Score:2)
iBeacon helps your phone find itself and thus you. It doesn't let others map your phone.
A merchant could make a system which finds you using iBeacon by self reporting. That is your phone finds itself and then an app on your phone tells the merchant. So if you want to find yourself, you can using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't. If you want the retailer to know where you are, you run their app which reports your location using iBeacon. If you don't want to, you don't.
The other kinds of systems which
XPrivacy (nt) (Score:3)
no text
As an added bonus... (Score:1)
The app will detect when you know what product you want and inform store associates to harass you and ask if you need any help... ...and detect when you're lost and tell the employees it's their lunch break.
Saving you time isn't their goal (Score:2)
Most stores don't want to minimize your time in the story. I think they want to maximize the time you spend near high-margin impulse-buy items, and up-sells of the items you originally intended to buy.
If I was a sleazy developer of software like this, and especially if I had access to the customer's whole shopping list, I'd send them on a pretty different path than their ideal one.