Retail stores are watching you more than you think

BusinessWeek reports on retailers’ use of RetailNext camera surveillance software to glean intelligence from shoppers’ behaviour.  The software takes a video feed to analyze customer behaviour.  RetailNext is a real-time in-store monitoring, enabling retailers and manufacturers to collect, analyze and visualize in-store data.” 

RetailNext’s software can integrate data from hardware such as RFID chips and motion sensors to track customers’ movements.  The company explains that it “tracks more than 20 million shoppers per month by collecting data from more than 15,000 sensors in retail stores.”  Its service apparently helps stores figure out where to place certain merchandise to boost sales.  3VR is used by T-Mobile to track how people move around their stores, how long they stand in front of displays, and which phones they pick up and for how long.  3VR is testing facial-recognition software that can identify shoppers’ gender and approximate age.  

Radical point: facial recognition matches you via Google Image search (drop an image on the search bar) and links you in person, space and time to your digital persona.  So the question for you, how do you get access to your data that is not captured by you or used to sell you more,  but is used to improve design?    ….. Is this your data at all?