[LINK] Shops track customers via mobile phone

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Shops track customers via mobile phone
Signals given off by phones allow shopping centres to monitor how long 
people stay and which stores they visit
Jonathan Richards
San Francisco
Times On Line
16 May 2008
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3945496.ece

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a 
new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their 
mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores 
they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they 
walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or 
contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential 
intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by 
mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring 
the phone’s distance from three receivers.

It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including 
Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it 
next month, Times Online has learnt.

The company that makes the dishes, which measure 30cm (12 inches) square 
and are placed on walls around the centre, said that they were useful to 
centres that wanted to learn more about the way their customers used the 
store.

A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were 
still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening 
hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to 
Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.

In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that 
an unusually high percentage of visitors were German - the receivers can 
tell in which country each phone is registered - which led to the 
management translating the instructions in the car park.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) expressed cautious approval 
of the technology, which does not identify the owner of the phone but 
rather the handset's IMEI code - a unique number given to every device 
so that the network can recognise it.

But an ICO spokesman said, "we would be very worried if this technology 
was used in connection with other systems that contain personal 
information, if the intention was to provide more detailed profiles 
about identifiable individuals and their shopping habits.”

Only the phone network can match a handset's IMEI number to the personal 
details of a customer.

Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the 
technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. 
"There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to 
the individual,” a spokeswoman said. “There's nothing personal in the data."

Liberty, the campaign group, said that although the data do not meet the 
legal definition of ‘personal information’, it "had the potential" to 
identify particular individuals' shopping habits by referencing 
information held by the phone networks.

The receivers together cost about £20,000 to rent per month. About 20 
the units, which are unobtrusive, cream-coloured boxes about the size of 
a satellite dish, would be needed to cover the Bluewater shopping centre.

Bluewater, in Kent, said it had no plans to deploy the equipment. A 
spokesman for Gunwharf Quays was not available for comment.

Owners of large buildings currently have to rely on manual surveys to 
find out how customers use the space, which can be relevant to questions 
of design such as where the toilets should be located or which stores 
should be placed next to one another.

Other types of wireless technology, such as wi-fi and Bluetooth, can be 
used to locate devices, but the regular phone network signal is 
preferable because it is much more powerful and fewer receivers are 
needed to monitor a given area.

Phone networks have long been capable of gauging the rough location of a 
handset using three phone masts, but the margin error can be as great as 
2km. The process is also less efficient when the phone is indoors. Path 
Intelligence's technology can tell where a phone is to "within a couple 
of metres."

"You're basically going to know that that person has been in Starbucks," 
Toby Oliver, the company's chief technology officer, said.

Even when the owner is not using it, a mobile phone makes contact with 
the network every couple of minutes, which is enough for the receivers 
to get a reading on its position.

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au