Beware
the bluetooth
Over the
last few years, there’s been a quiet revolution in retail marketing
empowering advertisers to track consumers in physical space.
Retailers have realized that, contrary to popular misconceptions,
most retail purchases are still made in brick-and-mortar stores–
not the online world of Amazon and Walmart. The capacity to track
each of us in the physical world offers an untapped market for
high-tech advertising. Google previously called this the Physical
Web, a new Internet of Things frontier that melds the online and
offline worlds into one.
To
facilitate online-offline tracking, Google and Apple developed
protocols for communications with mobile devices like smartphones.
The idea is to make the physical world, like a poster on a building,
something you can “click on” (i.e. interact with) without
installing a special app. The dominant weapon of choice is the
bluetooth beacon – silly putty-sized units that broadcast bluetooth
signals to track your precise location and send messages to your
phone. Bluetooth beacons are now scattered about stores, airports,
sporting arenas, malls, and other locales. The technology is several
years in the making.
Google
developed its Nearby APIs for incorporation into your phone. Google
software scans the area around your device for bluetooth beacons
(including iBeacons), which can then track you and broadcast messages
to your phone. For example, if you walk by a bluetooth beacon, it
might push a website URL to your phone that will display in your
Nearby Notifications.
Bluetooth
beacons function as a “light house” to broadcast signals to
mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Unlike GPS, which can
misread your location by a matter of several meters, bluetooth
can determine your location with fine precision. If you
walk down an aisle and a beacon is nearby, the beacon owner
(retailers, advertisers, or product vendors) can determine you’re
in that particular aisle or department. Beacon signals can reach up
70 meters.
Added to
this, individual apps often package in “tracker SDKs” that
collect various forms of smartphone data and activity. A team of
researchers found that over 7 in 10 apps incorporate hidden trackers
(usually to monetize surveillance). Some of these trackers surveil
your physical location using GPS, bluetooth, WiFi, or near-ultrasonic
sound.
“Proximity
marketing”, as it’s known in the industry, aims to transform
physical shopping into a total surveillance experience, bringing us
one step closer to a Minority Report world. Will this become
the new normal?
The Big
Data collected by proximity companies is merged into larger data sets
and analyzed by corporations like Salesforce, whose “intelligent
marketing hub” uses advanced statistics and AI to “stitch
together” user identities across devices (laptop, smartphone,
tablet), segment each of us into categories (like gender, age, and
location), and drive us along personalized advertising campaigns.
Can we
stop the emerging Internet of Stings, and with it, surveillance
capitalism? To secure real privacy, it’s going to take a movement
more committed than the battle for net neutrality. We need to take
close look at the players linked to the advertising industry – and
their vision for the future – to get a sense of what we’re up
against.
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