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Walgreens Installing ‘Smart Coolers’ To Spy On Shoppers

An outright consumer rebellion is the only thing that will stop giant companies like Walgreens from micro-tracking you from entrance to exit. Walgreens offers an empty promise that they won’t track your identity, but that is nonsense because other stores are already doing exactly that! ⁃ TN Editor

Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”—fridges equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. On January 14, the company announced its first trial at a store in Chicago in January, and plans to equip stores in New York and San Francisco with the tech.

Demographic information is key to retail shopping. Retailers want to know what people are buying, segmenting shoppers by gender, age, and income (to name a few characteristics) and then targeting them precisely. To that end, these smart coolers are a marvel.

If, for example, Pepsi launched an ad campaign targeting young women, it could use smart-cooler data to see if its campaign was working. These machines can draw all kinds of useful inferences: Maybe young men buy more Sprite if it’s displayed next to Mountain Dew. Maybe older women buy more ice cream on Thursday nights than any other day of the week. The tech also has “iris tracking” capabilities, meaning the company can collect data on which displayed items are the most looked at. https://www.technocracy.news/walgreens-installing-smart-coolers-to-spy-on-shoppers/