traking people in retail store

yooo89489 said:

how this can be done ??????

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TomTheCat said:

If you are asking, then the answer is simple. GPS tracking. For inside tracking in buildings there are used special sensors, but that's not possible without the device being tampered.

If you are wondering, then this is no surprise. They want to increase profits and offer the products with more profit margins.

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SimonBC said:

The legal and privacy implications however were totally different.

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SimonBC said:

I worked on Femto Cells in the UK to track people a few years ago (2007). They are small low powered mobile phone masts in a box.

The idea was that for example, if Vodafone customers walked past one, their phone would attempt to 'attach' to the femto cell mast station. If they had given permission for this before hand and were on a subscription list they would then attach and we could then message them directly and offer them deals since we would know who they are and where they are in real time.

If they had not signed up we could still track their footfall and behaviours because we still had the record of the connection attempt by their phone.

The problem was getting the femto cell area small enough to make the targeted marketing work. Apart from that (technically) it was quite simple to do. The legal and privacy implications however were totally different.

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Alenaxo said:

Wow that is insane. I wonder if that has any effect on us in the future. This could be a new marketing method

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SimonBC said:

the 'good things' about it are:
1. It did not depend on the customer switching on bluetooth and it draining the battery etc so was better than the bluetooth marketing solutions on offer at the time.
2. it did not depend on GPS or Wifi (again did not drain the battery or depend on the customer)
3. If the customer signed up we had permission to market to them
4. If the customer did not sign up we would still pick up the footfall and could connect it back to the mobile phone and ultimately the customer.
It basically used the natural design of GSM protocols to create a tiny mesh of base stations to track the customers phones the same as the normal masts do (and the police depend on) but at a much more granular level

for a phone call to be routed through the right mast to a phone the phone has to beacon out to a mast saying 'I am over here'. This enables the mobile phone network to route the call to the mobile phone via the nearest mast. This did exactly the same but at a much smaller scale. The phone would attempt to connect to the mini mast. It would be rejected because it was not on the approved list but we would have a record of the connection attempt regardless, and this is the electronic dust we produce every day as we walk around a city. It is the meta meta data we all produce.

if the customer was on the approved list we could immediately (if we wanted and they had signed up) send them a tailored message.

As far as I know it never came to anything (I designed it) and this was years ago

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Alenaxo said:

Wow that is insane. I wonder if that has any effect on us in the future. This could be a new marketing method

Click to expand...