Joseph Turow

The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow is very highly recommended.

It should be no surprise to consumers today how our purchases and interests are being tracked. What may surprise you is the extent of that tracking and the potential information the retail stores can and are gathering. Turow explains how retail stores are entering a new, hypercompetitive era with internet sellers. The brick-and-mortar stores will succeed only if they figure out how to trace, quantify, profile, and discriminate among shoppers. Stores now have the ability to track our movements and capture data about us through what we carry - our smart phones, bluetooth devices, fitbits, tablets, etc. If you have the GPS on your smart phone turned on, chances are you are also being tracked. The goal is to track our movements and what we buy, and then score our attractiveness as consumers based on that information. I would imagine almost all of us have noticed the personalized discounts often linked to our store rewards cards.

After providing background information on the history of retail stores, Turow moves into the advances in recent years, such as online stores like Amazon, and the emergence of Wal-Mart, a store with a super-efficient ability to send merchandise to stores for the continuous ability to restock items quickly. Even though these two retail giants can be much abased by some camps, they are the future of retail stores where the goal is now to find your niche or a way to stay competitive, thus profiling customers, collecting data, tracking their movements, and maybe even using facial recognition software to collect information about each individual who shops at your store. Think about this bit of information: "Acxiom executive Phil Mui claimed that 'for every consumer we have more than 5,000 attributes of customer data.'" The ultimate question is how much of this will consumers put up with this invasion of privacy and profiling of each customer before they decide enough is enough.

As Turow provides the background information and the extent that the retail community is using current technology to track us and get us to buy products by personalizing coupons or discounts. This is a well-written, thoroughly researched, accessible account of the future of shopping and provides startling insights about the prevalence of data collecting on individual consumers. The text includes extensive notes and an index.

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.… (altro)

What price loyalty

Business to Consumer (B2C) is its own universe. It is intense, fast paced, constantly changing and paranoid. The evolution of retail is one of more customer “rewards” that also reduce selling costs. As retailers compete, they implement programs from coupons, to green stamps, to freebies and instant personal discounts. Everything they try also must result in costcutting (staff reductions) – a win-win until everyone else adopts similar initiatives. Letting customers take stock from the shelves, putting it all in oversized shopping carts, recording all purchases and issuing incentives is a pattern traceable back to the Civil War, according to Joseph Turow. It was in the early 1900s that manufacturers started advertising directly to consumers, instead of relying on retail stores. (Today, drug companies are just doing the same thing.) From price stickers to turnstiles to barcodes, there’s constant tinkering. When Aisles Have Eyes is as fast paced as the industry. It is a blinding ride through loyalty programs, data mining, real life experiments, rewards and punishments – of the customer. For some it will be astonishing. For others it will confirm their worst fears. The information is valuable no matter who you are.

The continuous evolution of B2C has brought us to an era of tracking; every purchase, indeed every movement, of the feet, the hands or the eyes, is significant data. Obtaining all that data is intrusive. But in the newspeak of B2C, seamless and frictionless mean intrusions that manage to avoid overly annoying and causing the customer to pause or doubt. It’s like airlines crowing that customers demand cramped seats and no food on transcontinental flights, so that’s what’s they offer.

None of this data collecting would be possible without the shopper holding some sort of expensive, customized electronic reader, which has always held back the technology. But today, consumers pay for and voluntarily carry such Personal Tracking Devices – their smartphones. Using the phones’ settings that constantly seek Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and/or because the shopper has downloaded an app that automatically wakes up near a client establishment, the data has gone from overwhelming to infinite. Acxiom alone claims to have more than 5000 attributes for every one of nearly half a billion consumers. And there are hundreds of firms doing the same thing in their own way. Turow examines a huge number of them and their proselytizing executives. They live in another world.

In the raging battle, stores are at war with websites which offer instant price comparison apps. It is one thing for stores to modify their own goods and thereby give them new barcodes so mobiles can’t match them exactly. It is quite another to punish customers who don’t want to play the loyalty game and spend ever greater amounts (as the airlines have long done). But that’s where retail is going. Doesn’t matter that people object. Younger generations will not know anything different and consider it normal. That’s the foundation – and the pattern.

Possibly the most absurd case in the book is where camera systems not only identify loyal customers, but credit them reward points if they record them smiling. I suppose a store full of idiotically smiling customers would please the Happiness industry that has sprung up, but this level of behavior modification is too much - to buy a fresh salad.

The impression from all this activity is that outside of the new tools, there is nothing new in B2C. It has always been brutal, it has always been about finding the next small advantage, and it remains true that almost every major national or regional retailer eventually goes through bankruptcy anyway. The race continues despite customer pushback, privacy concerns, surveys, bigbrotherism and the creepiness factor of “personalization”. Like sharks, they must swim to survive. Turow says shoppers are like frogs: if you turn up the water temperature a little at a time, you might eventually boil them to death without them noticing.

David Wineberg… (altro)

Detailed, devastating revelations and analyses of how a vast cesspool of shamelessly predatory slime (my words, not Turow's) is employing Internet-use tracking and other privacy-invading techniques to classify individuals as (ad) "targets" or as "waste", corrupt the content-provision process, and cause societal degradations that extend beyond the online world. Fun reading these 200 pages are not, but extremely *important* reading they are. Why can't we make the collection, compilation, and trafficking of personal information totally illegal? Why can't we make individually targeted advertising totally illegal? Why were these things ever legal in the first place? For that matter, why was it ever legal for servers to write information (cookies) on the hard drives of computer owners without the latter's permission or knowledge?… (altro)