Careful Shoppers, Your Favorite Store’s Free Wifi is Actually Tracking You

Shoppers almost always jump with glee the instant they learn their favorite shopping store or boutique has WiFi. But did you know that this in-store privilege is actually already stalking, err, tracking you?

American upscale fashion retailer Nordstrom recently admitted that it worked around on a system to track and analyse the in-store movements of its customers. Information such as how many were first time visitors, how many were repeat visitors, including how much time they spend perusing on racks, trying the clothes before actually buying them were all being monitored and forwarded to a database for analyzing.

Nordstrom's stalking tendencies only stopped when shoppers panicked because the company posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them. At least, a point for honesty.

"We did hear some complaints," Tara Darrow, a spokeswoman for the store, told The New York Times, noting Nordstrom's experiment, which had started way back October 2012, had been terminated in May. But then again, that's seven months of creepy stalking, err, tracking.

"Way over the line," one consumer posted at Nordstrom's Facebook page. Nordstrom maintained the experiment was made anonymously.

Still, it remains a point of contention that brick-and-mortar retailers such as Nordstrom were not actually the first to conceive the tracking notion on consumers. It was actually the online sellers or e-commerce sites like Amazon who were the pioneers on this.

"Brick-and-mortar stores have been disadvantaged compared with online retailers, which get people's digital crumbs," Guido Jouret, Cisco's head emerging technologies group, which supplies tracking cameras to stores, said. Physical stores should also "be able to tell if someone who didn't buy was put off by prices, or was just coming in from the cold?"

Robert Plant, a computer information systems professor, said it is still different when you actually know you are being tracked physically.

"The idea that you're being stalked in a store is, I think, a bit creepy, as opposed to, it's only a cookie - they don't really know who I am."

Apart from Nordstrom, the other brick-and-mortar stores reported to be also using tracking systems in their stores were Family Dollar, Mothercare, Benetton, and Warby Parker.

Companies consistently maintained tracking the in-store movements of customers allows them to incur sales and profits as the technology helps them to work on their store layouts, concoct store promotions, as well as analyze data to determine what changes would best reach customers.