It is Overt (the process can be known to anyone (if they wish to find out) as well as the objects involved and instances of those objects (inputs and outputs).......
If:
Person being spied upon has allowed information gathering by default
Because:
Person did not opt out of information gathering
And:
Person had the opportunity to do so
And:
Person was informed of this opportunity
But:
Person did take opportunity offered (for any reason)
Then:
Overt personal information gathering is OK and use is allowed in accordance
any privacy laws and Information Gathering Entity policy not prohibited by law.
Analysis: What we don't care to know about nor take an action to change our assigned state of default because someone convinces us it is good (trust us, save money) can potentially bite us...... by default.
Affinion practices a default mode "Loyalty) business model. They use that model for illegal gain. Other "Loyalty" model programs are legit but it is very interesting to find out exactly what they are getting in return for our loyalty and how they are getting and using it.
Safeway runs a "Loyalty Model Program" that is legit, I think. It saves me money at the checkout and every time I check out the clerk tells me how much money I saved and calls me "mister".
Interesting to examine what Safeway gets out of the exchange.
There are several keys to what information Safeway has access to. One of them is the Mac code of my iPhone and the Safeway App I use to shop for deals that save me money at Safeway. It is an extension of their Safeway Shoppers Card. When I look at the App I see a very slick idea with sly implementation.
Recently I blogged about Tile. It uses Near Field Communication to discover and report location. NFC completes the technological communications ecosystem. An ecosystem that was initially created to address a communication problem domain of speed over distance in an evolutionary development of speed increase and distance decrease. Technologically it has gotten to the same fundamental speed/distance point we humans have always been with our language: Up close real time and personal. You talkin' to Me? However, in the case of technology it is our devices, those devices increasingly identified to us alone and uniquely that are doing the talking in a near field with connections through Bluetooth and Wifi and cellular to the wider world of internet communications. It is a "virtual distance world" in which distance is measured more in hops of the length of each radio wave component from the near field to the far field or far field by hard wire digital transmission. We did it with sound waves, technology does it with a different wave frequency for wireless communication.
NFC is "the last mile" in the communication ecosystem.
This talks about the whole concept and is, I think what Safeway is doing with it: How stores use your phone’s WiFi to track your shopping habits.
I went to the Safeway App on my iPhone and read the privacy statement. Very interesting as well as revealing in the context of the description at the link explaining how it all works in the back ground we are not aware of.
Tracking is a whole new growth industry. Maybe a good investment? Maybe like investing in needles when heroin use is growing rapidly?
I am going to do some investigation at my local Safeway and discover what kind of communications I am transmitting and how they are being used.
Spy vs Spy at my favorite local super market!
Spying: What fun!
Tracking shopping and data mining story here.
When I opened the App with my cell phone connection turned off it wanted me to connect to cell or wifi.
Several days later: I walked around the interior perimeter and up the center of my local Safeway store today and the Wifi bars were at full strength everywhere. Obviously providing the capability to triangulate in rel time and follow shopping paths as well as pauses. One of the places I paused for a couple minutes was check out where I input my telephone number to get my savings discount as well as my credit card to pay. How hard is that to match up and data mine?
Must be somebody offers the hardware, software and mining services. Should not be hard to find as well as tech data on how it all operates.
Wandering Wifi provides the wifi service it is now a division of Air Watch. While this provides blanket wifi coverage throughout the store for shoppers to use the Safeway App I have found no connection to the application of any indoor location technology.
YFind is a provider of shopper location finding services to an accuracy of 3 ft. The site explains how it is done. YFind was acquired by Rukus Wireless.
Indoor location is the next big thing.
Ruckus Wireless are pushing the boundaries in not only retail Wi-Fi, but Wi-Fi as a whole. Ruckus already have BeamFlex antennas and ChannelFly of which have solidified Ruckus as the #1 for speed, coverage & capacity. Now we all wait with anticipation to see the future developments with YFind as Ruckus advance the technology further.
Apple acquired WifiSlam
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