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In-store retail tracking is still in its nascent stages, but already it’s getting a bad rap. In fact, a recent study revealed that 67% of U.S. consumers think that in-store tracking “feels like spying.” With few restrictions — legal or otherwise– in place to mandate whether and how in-store tracking is implemented, it’s not uncommon for some stores to track without telling. The logic being, of course, that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Some stores engage in tracking onsite customers via their personal devices (most commonly using media access control, or MAC, address tracking). But in addition to feeling potentially invasive, in-store MAC address tracking is useless once the customer gets a new device and a new MAC address to go with it, making it impossible to measure the lifetime value of that customer. And even beyond the device lifecycle, customers are increasingly able to opt out of this tracking — much as they can opt out of tracking or disable cookies online — making this covert tracking even less effective than it had been very recently.

It’s not that all retailers are engaging in this under-the-radar behavioral monitoring, or that it’s always ineffective. It’s just that some of the most effective tracking, as OpinionLab CMO Jonathan Levitt recently pointed out, takes place out in the open, with customers asked to opt in. And in fact, when tracking is transparent, shoppers often see a value in it as well. Opt-in retail tracking has the potential to be as welcome to consumers as social media interaction. If retailers can make their relationship with customers two-way, so that they offer some sort of participatory value exchange to shoppers in the physical store, it will give shoppers an incentive to provide more information about themselves. And that information will be much, much richer than tracking data in a covert or anonymous fashion. In short, more transparent and participatory in-store experiences that ask shoppers to opt in and provide basic contact information will provide richer data that doesn’t just disappear when the next-gen smartphone comes out.

Continue reading at AdAge.com