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 ...
Sure you can. Just store your cell phone in a plastic mylar bag, like a potato chips bag.
The bag creates a Faraday Cage and prevents your phone from sending or receiving signals.
I can go for that but the wife unit would not be able to barrage me with endless text messages ;)
Would wrapping the phone/tablet, etc. in aluminum foil do the same thing?
All of them. I'd like to have encryption on my phone, but I don't trust it not to immediately ship my keys to some trollop at the NSA.
If you tapped into the electrical system of the truck to keep it powered, that would be really fun.
Just buy a sleeve that blocks the signal. It rendered the phone “out of service” while inside the sleeve.
I still don’t have a smart phone… guess I’ll just have to live with the computer sleuthing they do
Our phone is not sharing any secrets because we live in a dead zone, are retired and cannot justify the cost of a cell phone.
That is what the NSA wants you to think!
Protect your family. Get the iFoil hats today.
http://bigmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/tin-foil-hat.jpg
Yeah, uh huh, that's his story and he's sticking to it. It wouldn't take much to to stalk or blackmail his customers. One step more and he'll have their passwords and access to their bank. Seems like the Sochi Olympics would have more privacy.
Just another reason I don’t have a smartphone.
It’s been at 3-4 years since my cheapie non-smart one was used. It’s just there for emergencies. A $7/mo insurance. I just don’t see people’s need for a smart phone with all the lasted bells and whistles.
Mine is saying I don’t carry a smartphone so buzz off snoop.
Johnny: [after hearing the sirens] It’s the phone cops. They know what I did here today.
Venus: What are you talking about?
Johnny: They’re coming to get me, man!
Venus: That’s paranoia, man!
Johnny: Wake up, sucker, this is the phone company we’re talking about! They see everything, they know everything, they got their own covert police force! I’m probably wired for sound right now! I gotta get out of here!
Venus: Johnny!
Johnny: Don’t use my name!!
I almost never use my cell phone.
I hope my last conversation, which was with my husband, was interesting to whomever at the NSA/FBI was listening to us talk
about why our elderly cat is having diarrhea problems and what to do about eliminating whichever food may be causing it.
Carrier IQ Agent can be turned off permanently in Blackberry BES 10.1.3 or 10.2.
Exactly!
Yes. The plastic bag for chips, etc. is pretty much a sheet of aluminum foil with a plastic covering.
Put your phone in a chips bag and then try to call it. Does it ring?
Here's instructions for making a wallet from aluminum foil and duct tape. Handy for shielding RFID cards from snoops.
A friend changed providers mostly to get a new phone, so he just gave me the old one. I’d guess it’s four or five years old. The screen is about size of the credit card. It opens up with a real keyboard in the bottom part. It’s definitely poor for surfing the web, but I only use it now and then for that, mostly checking email from time to time if I’m out of town.
There was no fiddling around to make it work with wifi or anything like that. I enable wifi, I do my internet stuff in the McDonald’s or hotel room or wherever I am that has wifi, and then I turn the whole thing off again.
I have no “apps” on it as the first thing they ask you is a lot of personal questions. I don’t even want to make up a fake persona for that.
I use it mostly to play music that I’ve transferred to its own memory card, to take pictures now and then (note that there would be no location info on the pictures), and for making voice or text notes to myself.
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.
