The Aisles Have Eyes by Joseph Turow

Author:Joseph Turow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300212198
Publisher: Yale University Press

While many, if not most, loyalty programs can offer real value to shoppers, their unstated aim is also to train people to give up personal data willingly. shopkick, which pioneered ultrasonic and Bluetooth technologies to follow customers through stores and encourage them to interact with the retailer and provide personal information, has made capturing all sorts of data with little transparency an integral part of its business model. In an uncharacteristically frank reflection, a Best Buy representative said her company signed up with shopkick to “find new ways to bring people into our stores through the use of mobile technology, but more importantly, [to] know when they [individually identified shoppers] come into our store.”57 For shoppers shopkick emphasizes the rewards they can earn by scanning goods with the shopkick app and by purchasing products. According to the online magazine TechCrunch, an important part of shopkick’s success came from introducing “a level of ‘gamification’ to the shopping experience.” But the company’s privacy policy makes clear that it reserves the right to store, analyze, and use for profiling and “tailored” targeting virtually all the information it can gather on its users. The company also maintains the right to purchase information on shoppers from data brokers as well as to gather information that shoppers provide retailers “in the course of using their services.” shopkick further reserves the right to share any of this personal information with merchants so long as shoppers give shopkick their various merchant reward program account numbers (which many do out of convenience to simplify awards transactions), or identify themselves as a shopkick member (to earn points) when they make a purchase from a shopkick-related store. Only those customers who bother to wade through the privacy policy can learn of these conditions, as shopkick does not otherwise mention them. And although shopkick won’t share shopper information among its retailer clients—for example, it won’t tell Best Buy what a customer bought at Macy’s—it does compile all that data for itself and maintains the right to use it to analyze shopping behaviors and target shoppers with ads accordingly.

First Data Corporation, a major credit card payment processor, has blended its primary function with managing rewards programs for smaller businesses that otherwise aren’t set up to operate one.58 Using beacon technology, merchants are notified when rewards shoppers open the First Data’s Perka app upon entering a store; the notification includes the customer’s name, a photo, and most recent transaction at that business. Shoppers may appreciate a personalized greeting and offers that result from their presence being announced, but they likely are unaware that all the personal information that the app gathers on them in the process is shared with many sources outside that particular store. Perka’s privacy policy is even broader than shopkick’s in terms of allowing outside firms to purchase access to individual shopper data. Because customers use the app at any number of associated small- and medium-size businesses, Perka can harvest enormous amounts of information about the shoppers who use the app and visit the websites of these merchants.

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