Schumer and In-Store Tracking Companies Strike Deal for Privacy Protections
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More retailers are tracking shoppers via their mobile devices, but government and industry players are now trying to build privacy standards and tools into the technology –,before issues over privacy get out of hand. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, announced an initiative to that end on Tuesday with the support of several mobile tracking technology firms and The Future of Privacy Forum, a group that aims to help protect consumer privacy without squelching tech innovation.
“The time to impact these technologies is when they’re still being built,” said Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum.
Mobile tracking technologies that would be affected by the code of conduct often work by tracking the media access control, or MAC, addresses associated with shoppers’ mobile devices. The systems are used to gauge checkout wait times and to trace customer footpaths around stores or restaurants. Most shops using these technologies say that they don’t want to track people on an individual level and that the tracking systems usually only provide analytics data in aggregate.
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