Saturday evening my wife, the lovely and feisty CarolAnn Williams, went shopping with a friend. They went into a specialty store CarolAnn had never heard of and she bought a couple of inexpensive items using cash, not a credit card. She didn’t sign up for an email list or leave her name or phone number with anybody. In short, the people working in the store have no idea who she is, where she lives or how to contact her.
The next morning an ad for the same store popped up for the first time in CarolAnn’s Facebook feed on her phone.
Coincidence? Not likely, but here’s one:
Later that same morning I ran across a news item from the AP about a call by U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer for a federal investigation into the legality of companies tracking consumers by cell phone data gathered by billboards we pass in our daily lives.
Here’s a portion of the AP story:
The company, Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which has more than 675,000 displays in more than 40 countries, insists the information it uses is anonymous. The company said it launched a service that works with partner companies to match aggregated cellphone location data to maps of its billboards, so the company can gather information about the people who pass its displays and tell whether those people eventually end up visiting the advertiser’s stores.
The program, known as Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR, is a partnership between the outdoor advertiser and several companies, including AT&T and a technology corporation that uses location data collected from other smartphone apps, in order to track the travels and behaviors of consumers through their phones.
Schumer says he believes the company has created “spying billboards.” The New York Democrat is asking the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation to determine whether the tracking constitutes a deceptive trade practice.
While this article is focused on outdoor billboards the technology is also available for in-store displays and based on my wife’s experience I’d say we should assume they are in use.
So, here’s what I’m wondering:
Should I care? Is this an outrageous invasion of privacy or just another technological reality of a world in which we all carry cameras, recording devices and the ability to place tracking devices on cars, our kids and our dogs?
I’ve often said that since I’m going to be getting online ads anyway I might as well see things that are interesting to me, personally. Just today I bought a replacement hubcap for my car after an ad popped up – again, in my Facebook feed — for exactly what I needed at a good price. I had been Googling around for the hubcap so the fact that it appeared didn’t surprise me. The thing is, the first couple of times that happened a couple of years ago it freaked me out. Now I tend to think of it as a very cool customer convenience.
Which is it, convenience or intrusion? How much should we be willing to accept before we all come unglued, throw away our electronic devices and move into small cabins in the forests of Maine and Montana?
At this point I’m willing to believe we’ve all been spooked by a lifetime of spy stories and movies of nefarious entities trying to rob us of our freedoms and identity. On that level it all seems a little silly.
On the other hand, maybe I don’t have the big picture and just can’t imagine the terrible possibilities.
What do you think?
