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Europe Starts To Crack Down On Retail Data Collection

Written by Evan Schuman
March 10th, 2010
As Google—which has been toying with capturing retailers' in-store images for its search database—and mobile projects have been pushing the data-capture envelope, retailers have been able to sit back and think of 100 ways to use that data once it's organized and made accessible. Even the petabytes of free CRM data floating around in social sites are starting to be spidered and analyzed, not to mention payment cards designed for data-sharing and even more wacky ideas.

But we have now seen the first concrete government effort to slow down that data flow, and it comes from European Union data privacy regulators. An EU letter said that not only must Google provide more warnings to consumers before it sends cameras out to shoot street views, but that Google "should shorten the length of time for which it keeps the uncensored photographs it takes from one year to six months."

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Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry, Premium Content
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