Not to sound paranoid, but I’ve recently learned that my mobile phone conspires with retail giants.That’s right.
The devices we tote around for convenience — to text a friend, send an email or call out for fast food — have been co-opted by merchandizers eager to grab our attention and our credit cards.
True, we’ve been warned that all kinds of smart gadgets are giving us away, turning us in — from the EZ Pass on the dashboard to the cable box in the living room, which feeds political operatives hundreds of data points about individual households.
But I, at least, didn’t comprehend the stealthy reach of techno-savvy corporate marketing until I unwittingly dropped some digital crumbs among the designer handbags at Bloomingdale’s.
Ten minutes of browsing led the following day to an advertising blitz on Google of the very purse I had momentarily eyed. I couldn’t imagine how the search engine on my iPad, which I had not carried into the store, knew where I’d been or what I’d been looking at the day before.
Turns out that Bloomingdale’s, enlisting a firm called RetailNext, used Wi-Fi to snatch the unique identification code tied to all my mobile devices, mapped my path through the aisles, picked up signals from sensors on products I lingered over and then relayed the information to the all-knowing, all-seeing Google. If you don’t find that creepy, then you’re fully acclimated to the surveillance society.
Other national chains also track customers by tapping into our mobile phones, and more retailers are expected to engage in similar practices — much of it undisclosed — that aim to digitally dissect buying patterns and other social behavior.
Yet few people, including lawmakers, have reckoned with the implications of the mushrooming data cloud that trails us all. Heck, the politicians themselves crave all that granular information about voters that data-miners discover, courtesy of Comcast.
So much for watchdogs.
Many conservatives contend there’s no constitutional right to privacy, but it seems like the public should at least be informed when their phones and other devices are being used to extract personal data about private lives.
When Nordstrom posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them, shoppers complained, and the store halted the practice.
Maybe more of us ought to protest the applications and misapplications of stealth technology that monitors our every move. Bloomingdale’s doesn’t need to know that I covet $400 handbags any more than the Democratic Party needs to know that I occasionally switch the channel from The Daily Show to Fox News.
