Bluetooth Movement Tracking

Passing by the local Hugo Boss store, all of a sudden you receive a SMS message - "It's obvious you like out new suits collection since that's the 5th time you pass by our store, and spend on average 15 seconds staring at them. So, why don't you come inside and take a closer look for yourself?". Spooky? For sure, but with bluetooth movement tracking to faciliate purchases slowly emerging in the practices of evil marketers basically generating even more touch points with the assets in their brands' portofolios, it's something to keep an eye on :

"When the project was deployed at the ZeroOne Festival is San Jose, California, the system sent attendees messages about where they had been and asked about their intentions for being there. For example, one such message read, “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?” Those contacted were eventually led to the Loca kiosk where they could obtain a log of all their activities, which sometimes reached over 100m long. It should be noted that movement was only tracked on phones with discovery mode turned on."

Marketing research and faciliating purchases aren't the only incentives for marketers and of course malicious attackers looking for innovative ways to socially engineer you to accept a bluetooth connection, even an attachment. Measuring the ROI of advertising and sales practices that used to lack reliable metrics is becoming rather common, like for instance this Big Brother style billboards that measure how many people actually looked at them :

"If you’ve ever seen a poster in the mall that you’ve liked and stared at it for some time, chances are, that poster will be staring right back. This is, however, not so much of a "Big Brother" gimmick as much as it is a marketing tool. From xuuk, a Canadian-based company specializing in cutting-edge technology, comes the eyebox2. This contraption is essentially a tiny video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet, so even a simple glance from someone in passing will be tallied into the score."

I can certainly speculate that this technology will evolve in a way that it will be able to tell whether it was a male, or a female that looked at it, and if data from local stores gets syndicated to tell the system the prospective customer took notice of the store itself, it would provide the marketers with enough confidence to SMS you a discount offer valid in the next couple of hours only while you're still somewhere around a local store.

The convergence of surveillance technologies is a fact, and what's measuring the ROI of a marketing campaign to some, is an aggressive privacy violations for others. But as we've already seen the pattern of such technologies around the world, first they get legally abused, then customers suddenly turn into vivid privacy activists, to later on have the option to opt-in and opt-out so that everyone's happy.