For some mall shoppers, Black Friday has become Track Friday.
Thanks to a snoopy piece of tech from a U.K. company called Path Intelligence, some malls in Europe, L'Australie, and the United States will be tracking shoppers’ movements today through their cell phones.
A small number of discreet monitoring units installed throughout a mall, la compagnie dit, can grab signals from consumers’ mobile phones and track their movements with an accuracy of “a few meters.” That information is fed to a processing center where it is audited and analyzed to create a real-time picture of traffic flow through a shopping center. Mall operators can keep constant tabs on the information through Path Intelligence’s secure web-based reporting system.
As you’d expect with someone engaged in this kind of unsettling activity, the company swears it’s committed to protecting the privacy of the people it’s surveilling. “[L']ur detector units do not allow us to obtain your telephone number, to listen to any of your calls, read any SMS messages read or sent by you, or to log details of any calls or SMS messages made or received by you,” Path Intelligence states on its website. “Neither does any of the information received allow us to identify you or any group of individuals.”
Deux américains. malls–Promenade Temecula in Southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va.–will be launching the tracking service today and will use it through New Year’s Day, according to a report by CNN.
par le biais Certains centres commerciaux Suivi Shoppers travers leurs téléphones cellulaires pendant les Fêtes | PCWorld.
