But continuing revelations about how many different ways personal privacy is still disappearing are still enough to unnerve people. It is not just about the trail everybody leaves from the websites they visit, or from security cameras in public places. It is also about smart cars. It is about the cellular towers that serve their smartphones. And it is now also about their friendly brick-and-mortar retailer.
One example of many is clothing retailer Nordstrom, which began tracking shoppers in its stores about a year ago through the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones.
At least the company was somewhat transparent about it -- it posted a sign telling customers what it was doing. But that generated enough complaints for it to end the program in May.
Of course, Nordstrom is not the only retailer looking to track shoppers in its physical stores. And at one level, they and their defenders argue that this is not a big deal -- that they aren't doing anything more intrusive than those in the online world who track the activities of shoppers and then try to pitch them ads that will be more "relevant." They're just catching up.
They could argue that it is less intrusive than plenty of other data collection, from social networking sites like Facebook to government, in the form of the National Security Agency (NSA). Stillman Bradish, co-founder of The Wireless Registry, a D.C.-based start-up that is reportedly designing ways for consumers to opt out of the tracking, told the Washington Post that, in general, Wi-Fi tracking doesn't collect PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
And, as plenty of privacy experts have pointed out, the "new normal" today is for people to spill every detail of their lives online, including where they shopped and what they bought.
Veteran private investigator Steven Rambam has been telling audiences for years that the logical result of all that voluntary sharing is that, "Privacy is dead, and you guys murdered it."
At one point in a presentation to The Next HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference three years ago, Rambam asked how many had Facebook pages. Every hand went up. Then he asked those who had read Facebook's Terms of Service to keep their hands up. Every hand went down.
[Chomsky, Gellman talk Big Data at MIT conference]
He was even more critical of users of social networks like Swipely, designed for friends to share their purchase history. "Why would you put your shopping history on (things like that)?" he said. "You deserve every bit of screwing that you get."
Still, consumers have a sense -- logical or not -- that they have some control over the voluntary sharing they do, while they have little or none over a retailer tracking their movements in a store.
The tracking is possible because of the MAC (Media Access Control) address that all Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-enabled devices have -- a unique, 12-digit code to help routers send data to the right recipient. When a Wi-Fi card is on, looking for networks to join, it is detectable by local routers, such as those in a retail establishment.
Through that, the company can learn how long people stand in line at a cash register, what aisles they visit and for how long, what promotions are more effective, who visits their stores more than once, what spot in the store draws the most people and much more.
This information is logged and uploaded to third-party companies that conduct data analytics. According to Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), nine firms have most of the market for analyzing tracking data, but there are 40 or more in the field.
The obvious goal of all this is, on its face, rather benign. "They want to sell you stuff," said Rambam. But privacy advocates say it can and does go well beyond that.
From CSO
