FollowRemember the free Wi-Fi your phone detected when you are in the airport or while you are at your favorite coffee store sipping your latte? The good news is that these Wi-Fi coverage and services are getting better and better. The bad news is that the owner of these Wi-Fi hotspots can use it to track your phone and by tracking your phone, they are basically tracking you.
To make it even worse, they do not even need your cellphones to log-in to the Wi-Fi to track your cellphone. If your cellphones are in Wi-Fi detection mode, the Wi-Fi server can automatically know where are your cellphones located since your cellphone will be transmitting inquiries to the Wi-Fi server even though you are not accessing the Wi-Fi. This kind of technology is available and is already being tested by retail companies such as Nortsdrom.
By using this technology, the company hopes to track its customers movements by following their customer’s Wi-Fi signals emitted from their smartphones. So, if any company would use this concept, they can actually track their customer’s real-time movements in their retail shop. By doing this, they can learn the buying pattern of its customers and therefore help them rearrange the layout of their retail store to better improve the buying experience of shoppers.
Since your smartphones identity is unique, the technology can also keep track of whether the customer is a new customer or a repeat customer and what the items that they will usually buy. They can also track the duration of the customers spending their time inside the retail store.