 |
 |
|
|
 |
Will Police Turn Buying Habits Into Grocery Fingerprints?
Written by Evan Schuman
February 29, 2008
Are we looking at a near future where consumers' purchase profiles will be used by law enforcement to track down fugitives?
The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade's worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found.
Among those terabytes of tenacious consumer telemetry are not only all of a shopper's preferences, but smartcarts and personal shopping assistants have the potential to record what a consumer thought about buying.
That's true to the extent that you can assume that a consumer who slowed down in from of a display of Cheerios and picked up—and then put down—a box of Cheerios was probably thinking of buying those Cheerios.
But Cheerios are fairly innocuous. What if it was a butcher's knife? More to the point, what about those patterns that databases are so good at finding? It might not be that unusual for a customer to purchase blue Dial soap or licorice-scented shave cream or alfalfa sprouts or Poland Spring distilled water. But if a suspect has repeatedly purchased those products for years, isn't it likely he'll continue when he's hiding in one location long enough?
A database that could analyze a suspect's shopping history and then ask POS systems nationwide to look for close matches is entirely practical.
Consider this scenario: John O'Hara is a professional hitman and he's accidentally killed a high-ranking government official. Knowing that he has perhaps two days before they'll zero in on him as a suspect, O'Hara decides to disappear. He withdraws as much cash as he can from his bank. Yes, he knows that will later indicate that he fled, but he's assuming they'll figure that out anyway.
He shreds all of his credit cards and identification, using some of his cash to purchase bogus identity cards. He leaves his cellphone behind and drives as far as he can, as quickly as he can. With long driving sessions, he figures, he'll be 1,000 miles away in just a few days.
O'Hara knows enough to not ever call any of his friends and family, knowing that the telecos will be watching for his calling pattern to reemerge, with calls to the same repeated numbers. If he's smart, he'll stop all prior contacts.
But he's eventually going to settle somewhere and will likely resume his supermarket shopping and dining purchases. Even if he avoids getting a loyalty card, his pattern will still likely remerge, if the POS system is watching for it. It won't know who, but the system will know that someone made a purchase at 10:42 PM, with the telltale blue Dial soap, licorice-scented shave cream, alfalfa sprouts and Poland Spring distilled water.
If that pattern happens a few more times, an alert could be generated, the store put on surveillance, timed with when this person has been shopping.
This hasn't happened yet, but retailers are collecting so much data that goes lightyears beyond credit card numbers, expiration dates and home addresses, that it is inevitable.
When I spent years covering law enforcement, it was rarely the big splashy investigative techniques that impressed me, but the quiet, creative ones. Such as the detective who learned everything he could about a suspect on the lam and then started checking subscriptions for hobby magazines. This was in the days before online pubs.
Sure enough, he found three niche publications that he read, which had little to do with each other. New subscriptions for those publications found the intersection and the suspect was located.
Customer profiles are all about habits and using those habits to predict behaviors. No matter I go, people will be able to find me because I love bok choy and always ask that it be added to my Chinese take-out. Some day, when I'm on the run from some homicidal PR person that I pushed too hard, that bok choy will be my undoing.
I offer this science-fiction crime drama tale to make a point. Once data is collected, it's almost impossible to get rid of, especially if a retailer has spent millions gathering it. Not only is data more or less permanent, but it will invariably be used for 50 things that the people who collected the data never intended.
It's good to network and share data across a chain and to use this technology to understand customers as well as possible. But to paraphrase the late British poet John Donne, "Never send to know for whom the unique identifier tolls as it tolls for thee."
Knowledge may be expensive and ignorance more so, but the societal price for knowledge used in the wrong way has a price that none of us will know until it's paid. When that happens, Visa just won't cut it. |
|
 |
Advertisement 
 
|
Evan Schuman is the former retail technology editor for eWEEK.com, PCMagazine, CIOInsight and retail reporter for RISNews and Consumer Goods Technology. Having covered IT issues for 21 years - and other stuff like legal affairs, politics, Wall Street and the environment for about eight years before that - Schuman is in a good position to gripe about technology trends and sometimes accidentally make a good point.
|
|
 |
 |
|
Over the last month, I've been struck by an unusually large number of reader E-mails that fundamentally question whether E-Commerce will ever truly work: Whether it will consistently make money, be profitable and be, well, worth all of the effort.
If the slip of a lip can sink a ship, perhaps a retailer's flick of the click can kill a prestigious campaign mighty quick. The best way for a retail chain to make a customer happy is to offer him/her a program that few others can get. And the best way to undermine that—as Best Buy discovered on Wed. (Sept. 3)—is to then accidentally make that offer to every single reward customer you have.
It looks like Amazon is no longer backing up its pricing, putting an end to its Post-Order Price Guarantee — a policy that allowed customers to recover the difference from an Amazon price drop within 30 days of a purchase. As of Monday (Sept. 1), customers who place orders on Amazon.com are not offered the 30-day guarantee, a customer service representative confirmed.
Security is nothing if not filled with seeming contradictions, and the latest version of PCI—slated to be officially unveiled next month (October)—is highlighting a beauty: To most effectively protect payment-card-related systems, protection must be focused on anything that is not related to payment card data.
Quite a few retailers have been involved in site changes to make the Web more accessible to those with vision difficulties, but Target has been the most aggressive in fighting such efforts. As such, Target's settlement has an especially strong chance of pressuring retailers to aggressively embrace such changes.
Wal-Mart on Wednesday (Sept. 3) launched what it dubbed the Walmart Smart Network—a series of next-generation digital-ad systems—to 2,700 stores. The funky aspect of this rollout is that all 27,000 screens will be centrally controlled via an Internet Protocol Television connection.
Site navigation problems and unpleasant booking engines are driving customers away from online travel sites and pushing them through the doors of traditional, more personable travel agencies. Even though sales for online travel sites are growing, fewer travelers are actually booking their trips online.
A TJX senior executive is apparently trying to push chip-and-PIN, arguing that cyberthieves are focused on the United States partly because we haven't adopted it. "Criminals, I believe, are focusing on the countries that haven't added that higher level of security," TJX Vice Chairman Donald G. Campbell said.
Calvin Klein finally gave its HTML blessing to E-Commerce, offering its first for-sale items on its Web site, although the E-Commerce launch is U.S.-only. Anyone visiting from outside the United States will be routed to the existing corporate brochure site.
It seems clear that most retailers are adopting one of two distinctly different strategies when it comes to data security and compliance. Let's label them Cost-Effective Compliance (CEC) and Compliance-Driven Security (CDS). Both approaches are based on best practices and solid risk management principles. But, GuestView Columnist David Taylor argues, they lead to quite different spending patterns, technology decisions and business cultures.
A retail IT lesson from the world of politics? Maybe. Web tracking firm Keynote was studied the text message blast sent by the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the one in which his campaign promised to tell supporters his VP selection before it was broadly announced.
Has Amazon decided what it wants to be when it grows up? More to the point, are there indications that it has now decided that one thing it does not want to be is yet another thin-margined retailer?
The IT chief at Netflix has pointed the finger of blame for its site problems last month at "a database corruption event in our shipping system." The problem prevented customers from receiving their DVDs for about three days.
Almost a year after TJX settled with banks and bank associations impacted by the worst data breach in credit card history, another bank has come forward with its own lawsuit against the retailer, claiming the incident compromised some 4,000 of its customer accounts.
The number of data breaches reported as of Aug. 22 of this year has already surpassed the total number in all of 2007, including a new one from Macy's impacting some 4,100 customers.
On the best-paid list of CIOs at publicly held companies, Best Buy's Bob Willett ($4.7 million), Home Depot's Bob DeRodes ($4.3 million) and Kohl's Thomas Kingsbury ($2.5 million) stand at the top, doing the pocket-protector crowd proud.
With the frequent product changes executed by any large e-tailer's site, the tech hurdles of launching a mirror site in another language can be daunting. But this challenge has created a small industry of companies that are trying to facilitate rapid globalization for e-tailers.
JCPenney is testing the Australian waters a bit with an online push. The retailer has a local URL and an Australian company handling all operations, but it's still shipping merchandise from the States and asking Australian shoppers to wait "12 to 14 working days. This "request" prompted one Australian publication to ask "whether Australians would be prepared to wait two weeks to receive something purchased online."
In an overall down market where the 150-store Nordstrom chain is seeing a 4.3 percent sales drop, online operations are accounting for 15 percent, hitting almost 8 percent of all sales. Company execs there now project online to soon top 10 percent.
The new version of PCI due out in October will let the outdated WEP wireless security standard stick around for almost two more years, while also reducing the required frequency of firewall rule reviews.
It's late on a Friday night and as Jane Smith walks into her local grocery frozen food aisle, she notices a neighbor walking away carrying a frozen pizza, right near a digital advertisement for 20 percent off of a Budweiser six-pack. Jane reaches into the freezer to grab her favorite Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream but notices that the digital ad instantly changes to hawk 40 percent off fresh apple pie in the bakery section.
It's generally accepted that any key economic issue—whether it's a housing slump, rising gas prices or tax refund checks—can have a sharp impact on business spending. But the IHL Group is floating an interesting theory that recent gas price hikes are going to have a very specific and direct impact on IT spending next year.
After years of trials with only the rarest evidence of CFO-friendly RFID ROI, shelf stock monitoring is quickly emerging as "the first major application of RFID in retail with a strong business case," according to a new report from London-based RFID analyst firm IDTechEx.
While North American retail execs are planning for trivial—if any—IT investment increases this year, with "more than one-quarter of retailers expecting lower IT spending," more than half of their Asian Pacific counterparts are preparing for significantly higher IT spending, according to new Forrester numbers released this week. A bit of the Tortoise and the Hare perhaps?
A gang of data thieves in Ireland has well learned the lesson that the best place to hide is in plain sight. The group hit a large number of retailers throughout Ireland and grabbed more than 20,000 payment cards by placing skimmers on card-swipes by wearing what appeared to be maintenance uniforms and saying that they were performing bank repairs.
These days, when U.S. government officials want to ask questions about privacy and data security, it's never clear if they want to protect consumers' privacy or learn the best way to violate it themselves. But retail execs who want hints can drop by a Sept. 22 hearing at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Washington, D.C., headquarters.
Retailers who are worried about RFID security problems will have more details available to them now that a federal judge has killed a gag order on MIT students who had identified flaws in Boston's contactless RFID subway cards.
Based on the PCI Standards Committee's official hints about what will be in the 1.2 release, it appears that clarifying when and how virtualized servers can be PCI compliant didn't make the cut. But before the server and security geeks start lighting their torches and getting all "vigilante" on the card brands, let GuestView Columnist David Taylor make his case for why it won't matter in the slightest.
As major chains are doubling up their focus on computer-savvy young consumers, some are finding their aversion to avatars giving in to their adoration of avarice.
A "persistent and mysterious technical glitch" has severely disrupted business operations at the massive online film rental site Netflix, "potentially affecting millions of its customers."