Brian Fung of The Washington Post noted in a recent article, “How Stores Use Your Phone’s (News - Alert) Wi-Fi to Track Your Shopping Habits,” that these days, owners of brick-and-mortar stores are able to use Wi-Fi to learn a great deal about their customers (much like owners of eCommerce sites are able to use analytics to learn a great deal about their customers).
Every smartphone comes with a Wi-Fi card. In retail environments, Fung says, in-store equipment is able to pick up customers’ Wi-Fi cards, learn the device’s unique ID number, and use that information to “keep tabs” on customers’ devices as they move through the store.
Jules Polonetsky, the director of a Washington think tank, told Fung that owners of brick-and-mortar stores are able to garner very specific insights from customers’ smartphones. Among the insights, “The average wait time at the back register is two minutes. Half of your customers have been in your store twice in a week. Ten percent of the people who come in your store never come near a register, meaning they don’t buy anything. There are a lot of people not finding what they want.”
These insights are incredibly valuable to retailers, and tracking these insights has become an emerging industry. Every smartphone today comes equipped with a Wi-Fi card. When that card is activated, whether it is in your home or in a retail environment, it seeks a router to connect to. Once that router is selected, you have Internet access. However, when you connect to a Wi-Fi system, retailers are also able to connect to you—they have your card ID number, and they can track you throughout the store. This information allows retailers to track customer spending habits within the store and also track their behavior by targeting which areas they spend the most time in.
Stillman Bradish and Patrick Parodi, the founders of the Wireless Registry, have joined together with Future of Privacy Forum to create a central Do Not Call list for MAC addresses. Parodi says that this database will “allow people to take control over their proximal identities.” The registry is scheduled to start in the next few weeks, and Polonetsky says that he's still working out the agreement with the analytics companies.