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Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

nytimes.com

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Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#61

Post by andrewgioia »

rolltiide wrote: post #36
andrewgioia wrote: post #24

This is rage inducing. I went into this article thinking "ok as long as I don't have the Target or Ikea or whatever app installed on my phone, I'm fine." While that is a primary way, this needs to be outlawed: > These companies take their beacon tracking code and bundle it into a toolkit developers can use. The makers of many popular apps, such as those for news or weather updates, insert these toolkits into their ap…

This is how an app like Facebook can show you an ad on something you were talking about. It would be naive to point the finger at Facebook listening to you, it would be more accurate to assume its EVERY OTHER app (including FB) gathering data about you and your surroundings - MAYBE ONE IS ACTUALLY LISTENING - but whether any individual app is or isn't, the data brokers have all the data as well as other people like y…

Yes absolutely, everyone else is gathering this apparently and it has to just be assumed now. I hadn't thought about it with the "facebook is listening" stuff but this makes way more sense.

It's particularly frustrating given how hard I try to disassociate myself and my family from "data brokers" and then I read another thing like this.

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#62

Post by wkavey »

takk309 wrote: post #59

Based on the title of the article I was expecting the stores to passively collect data based on the MAC address. I guess I was way wrong. I am a traffic engineer and we use passive BT MAC address scanners to sort out origin/destination and travel time. This is done by setting up multiple detectors around a study area. Each detector saves the time and MAC address of every device it detects. We later match the MAC addr…

To me there is a difference between what you describe, where hardware deployed in stores collect detected bluetooth signatures, and what this article describes, which is YOUR OWN DEVICE reporting on your movements.

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#63

Post by _bxg1 »

ajkjk wrote: post #8

Nothing would make me want to buy yogurt less than an ad on my phone while I'm looking at yogurt. I would hope everyone would feel the same way, to disincentivize this.

The best way to protest surveillance capitalism is to make it ineffective. If you get a pushy or creepy ad, go out of your way to avoid that product or brand. Even if it is appealing to you. Even if it's a good deal. Send the strongest kind of signal against targeted ads: money.

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#65

Post by AJ007 »

dTal wrote: post #28

>Location marketing aims to understand “online-offline attribution.” If a Starbucks coffee ad is sent to your email, for example, marketers want to know if you actually went there and bought a coffee. The only way to know is to monitor your online and offline habits at all times. Make no mistake: the purpose of marketing is to maximize information asymmetry. The natural end point is totalitarian: they know everything…

Advertising/marketing word differences aside, when you put all of this into a bid based auction marketplace, the results for customers are pretty ugly. The flipside is that when a company over-optimizes their ad campaign and the margins of their product, there is no word of mouth and customers leave quickly because eventually the product is complete shit.

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#66

Post by vertoc »

crazygringo wrote: post #60

I feel like I need a lot more clarification here, can anybody help out, whether on iOS or Android: 1) Some random third-party app has to be running on your phone to detect beacons and send the data back... how viable/likely is this actually? It seems like this would only ever effectively detect a tiny percentage of users at best who just happen to have one of the apps open while walking around a store? 2) For an app…

Unsure about the others but for (2), no. These beacons use low energy Bluetooth so when the app finds a beacon with just Bluetooth (which doesn’t require explicit permission afaik) it can simply report back with that - presumably the owner of the beacon (the store) knows where the beacon is and now they know your approximate location without any phone location services necessary

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#67

Post by wkavey »

crazygringo wrote: post #60

I feel like I need a lot more clarification here, can anybody help out, whether on iOS or Android: 1) Some random third-party app has to be running on your phone to detect beacons and send the data back... how viable/likely is this actually? It seems like this would only ever effectively detect a tiny percentage of users at best who just happen to have one of the apps open while walking around a store? 2) For an app…

I can answer some of these... keep in mind this perspective is from the Android ecosystem, where I was able to get a similar system working.

1. Apps can be running in the background. I'd say its more common than you think 2. You need to provide location permissions (either the ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION or ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION). It seems like every app requests these permissions anyway, so not a red flag just on its own. 3. Something scanning for a WIFI devices has no way (easily) to coorelate those addresses back to a user. With this bluetooth low energy method, the users own phone is the one who reports the detection back to {company}'s servers, so it can pass along any/all other information it has about you. Their location accuracy is also pretty crazy (radius is within centimeters if they've done it well). 4. Bluetooth low energy is actually crazy easy to set up, see here for more... https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#68

Post by wkavey »

wkavey wrote: post #67
crazygringo wrote: post #60

I feel like I need a lot more clarification here, can anybody help out, whether on iOS or Android: 1) Some random third-party app has to be running on your phone to detect beacons and send the data back... how viable/likely is this actually? It seems like this would only ever effectively detect a tiny percentage of users at best who just happen to have one of the apps open while walking around a store? 2) For an app…

I can answer some of these... keep in mind this perspective is from the Android ecosystem, where I was able to get a similar system working. 1. Apps can be running in the background. I'd say its more common than you think 2. You need to provide location permissions (either the ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION or ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION). It seems like every app requests these permissions anyway, so not a red flag just on its own.…

Formatting :( Cant even edit to correct it

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#69

Post by social_quotient »

It’s worse. I have personal knowledge from a lot client work in this space.

There are companies offering some basic functions like “wayfinding” so the retailer or mall wants to give wayfinding to the user in their app. Sounds good, in fact it’s cheap, and they will even handle the beacon deployment... hook up sdk to wireshark and find it sending lots of data, some of it comes to me (retailer api) but a metric ton of it is going back to the provider. Being able to see the installed solution in multiple retailers and seeing the app code you start to notice persistence between them... retailer and mall didn’t even ask for this. They just wanted wayfinding.

Re: Retail stores use Bluetooth beacons to track customers

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

_bxg1 wrote: post #52
andrewgioia wrote: post #24

This is rage inducing. I went into this article thinking "ok as long as I don't have the Target or Ikea or whatever app installed on my phone, I'm fine." While that is a primary way, this needs to be outlawed: > These companies take their beacon tracking code and bundle it into a toolkit developers can use. The makers of many popular apps, such as those for news or weather updates, insert these toolkits into their ap…

Just disable background activity for all apps that you don't fully trust. For me, that pretty much means like four first-party Apple apps that actually reasonably need it.

That's a good personal workaround, but it's not a solution to a problem - much like moving to a different city doesn't solve the problem of the manufacturing plant poisoning the water supply of the city you live in.

Adtech industry needs to be torched. GDPR was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately isn't nearly enough (I'd start with more aggressive enforcement of it, though). Something to pressure your politicians for.

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