For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the issue is the fact that major corporations like Target, Nordstrom's, Family Dollar, Cabela’s, Macy's and Mothercare, along with untold other numbers of stores, are now using the WIFI PING capabilities on your cell phone to track you while you are shopping in their stores.
Not only are they tracking the number of customers who come in the stores, but they are also tracking how long you spend stopped in front of a particular item, what parts of the stores you spend the most time in, and, depending on the level of service they have subscribed to, may even be able to tell what items you are actually considering based on the number of times you go back and forth between items to do comparison shopping and price checking of various like items.
So how are they able to track us within their stores, and just what information can they gather?
The how part is easy: they take advantage of the fact that our cell phones are, in many cases, constantly pinging for available WIFI networks so they can notify us that free or "open" WIFI service is available for our use. They are taking advantage of the fact that most of us are cheap and too lazy to do manual searches for WIFI, allowing our mobile devices to do the searching for such service and automatically notify us when those services are available.
They are also taking advantage of the fact that the steel roof and iron girder superstructures of their stores, along with the other wireless signal absorbing materials used in the construction of such facilities frequently absorbs so much of the cellular network's signal level as to make it unusable within those stores and take advantage of the fact that, by our very nature we will almost automatically take advantage of their free WIFI network to see if we can find an item sold within their stores for less money on Amazon or another web-based sales portal - which is frequently the case with most overpriced items, especially in major electronics stores like Bust Buy and the former Circus City stores where there was not, nor has there ever been, such a thing as a knowledgeable sales person or good customer service.
In defense of those stores who have adopted this tracking method, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to tracking customer spending habits. Online vendors like Amazon have technology to their advantage because they can follow our every move electronically, keep a digital record of every item we look at, set cookies in our browsers, and use our logins and purchase history to know what our preferences are, how much we like to spend, and what we are looking for as soon as we walk in the digital door. The poor bastards at the brick and mortar locations don't have such advantages and most of the human employees they have would not be capable of compiling such data even if they had the tools to do so in real time. Fortunately someone created the sales person and equipped those ruthless individuals with the tools to bring tracking similar to the online retailers to the physical store level . . .
The Actual Technology: I've already eluded to the fact that these stores are using our mobile devices to track us via their WIFI networks, but exactly what technology are they using? It's simpler than it sounds: they track our MAC addresses . . .
The MAC address is a unique code which is assigned to every network interface. Whether a connection is made via Bluetooth, a hard-wired connection, or a wireless connection, there's a MAC address involved. The MAC address is a HEXIDECIMAL or BASE 16 number which is hard encoded into the electronics of the device and looks something like this: 00:4B:9F:21:6C:A7. This unique set of 12 numbers, which can range from 0 through F, gives the ability to set a unique, non-repeating identifier to every network device and is the code which is tracked by the services which the stores have now authorized third-party vendors to collect and store in the cloud -- WITHOUT first gaining your permission to do so -- tracking your every move and spending habits.
So Who's Collecting the Actual Data: While there may be other vendors, the largest culprits in the shopper MAC address conspiracy business are currently Euclid Elements, NOMI, RetailNext, and Sparkfly.
What Can You Do to Protect Yourself: The simplest solution is to turn off your cell phone whenever you get out of the car to go shopping. No matter where you go, someone is going to try to figure out how to more effectively make you think you really need to purchase something you don't actually want to spend your money on.
The other solution is to OPT OUT.
OPTING OUT: The bad news is that, at least in most cases, you'll never know you're being tracked.
Both Euclid Elements and NOMI provide OPT OUT websites where you can plug in your the MAC address of your cell phone and have them remove all tracking of that unique ID from their databases.
To opt out or Euclid Elements, go to: https://signup.euclidelements.com/optout
To opt out of NOMI, click on this link and then scroll down to the OPT OUT link at the very bottom of the screen.
RETAILNET does not provide an opt-out solution at this time.
SPARKFLY does not provide an opt-out solution at this time.
To opt our of being tracked requires that you look up your MAC address on your cell phone or wireless device so you may want to do that ahead of time so you can have it handy. Pay close attention to the format you use when entering that number as the format is six sets of two hexadecimal digits separated by a COLON ":"
Finding your MAC address:
- Iphone Settings > General > About > Wi-Fi Address
- Android Settings > About > "Status" or "Hardware information" > Wi-Fi MAC address
- Blackberry OS 4.5-5.0: Options > Status > WLAN MAC
OS 6.0-7.1: Setup > Options > Device > Device and Status Information > WLAN MAC - Windows Phone
Settings > About > More info > MAC address
SUMMARY:
If you want to be truly safe from tracking while shopping, turn off your cell phones before you even pull into the parking lot!
=====================
Be certain to like us on FaceBook, too.
