Posted on 01/14/2014 7:09:37 AM PST by Second Amendment First
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers' knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people's habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
"Instead of offering a general promotion that may or may not hit a nerve, we can promote specifically to the customer's taste," says Mr. Zhang. He recently emblazoned workout tank-tops with his restaurant's logo, based on the data about his customers' gym visits.
Turnstyle is at the forefront of a movement to track consumers who are continuously broadcasting their location from phones. Other startups, such as San Francisco-based Euclid Analytics Inc., use sensors to analyze foot-traffic patterns, largely within an individual retailer's properties to glean insight about customer behavior.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Mine is revealing that I don’t have much of a social life.
"Locations have meanings," says Eloise Gratton, a privacy lawyer. Marketers can infer that a person has a certain disease from their Internet searches. A geolocation company can actually see the person visiting the doctor, "making the inference that the individual has this disease probably even more accurate," she says.
Mine reveals i love cute kitty cat videos
What people don’t realize is that most all carriers are embedding a program named Carrier IQ. Not only does it capture every key stroke it overrides your system and turns on services like the GPS locater that I cannot keep turned off. It comes on every time the tower signal changes or you make/receive a call. Of course AT&T and other carriers deny it is there but you can download an app the will tell you if it is installed. Plus you CANNOT turn it off.
Same here! And the person(s) who share the same last name seldom call(s) their mother!
Mine is revealing that it’s about 20m from the nearest town with any meaningful number of businesses. That is, when it’s not dead from non use over the course of a month or longer. It’s at least that long between uses. I don’t always remember to keep it charged.
What about an app to turn it off?
You can remove the battery and SIM card, but becomes a PITA when you need to use the phone, or if someone wants to reach you.
There is one but you have to jailbreak the phone. Not an option on a new $400 phone.
Mine would say I made frequent trips to the dog food store and since Houston has a 3 dog limit they could guess that I had more than 3 dogs, and they would be right! (I am such a criminal)
Am I going to be arrested? I doubt it I have an old flip phone and I’ll betcha’ I am skating under the radar.
about a year ago I started leaving my flip phone at home - haven’t missed it, never use it anymore - I figure if theres an emergency - someone else has one
"..????...my friend who lives in Jersey City, must have revealed that he can walk directly under major roadways and apartment buildings while on his way to the Hudson river since his daughter (2) threw his phone down a curb side drain a few weeks ago"
Mine would say that my phone is a very sad, lonely little device. The only places I’ve ever taken it to are the vet, the market and the library. Poor little phone.
All you have to do is turn WiFi off. Problem solved. You shouldn’t have it turned on anyway unless you are at home.
The cell phone is for MY convenience, not the convenience of the people who call me. The only ones who get the number are family, a handful of trusted work colleagues and top customers.
Mine will reveal...work...then home...then work the next day...then home again...with an occasional side trip to purchase groceries...the thrills are coming hard and fast, I tell ya.
I’ve always thought that taping an old phone to the underside of an Allied Van Lines trailer would be interesting.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.