[iwar] [fc:Smile,.You're.on.In-Store.Camera]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-08 08:17:05
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Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 08:17:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Smile,.You're.on.In-Store.Camera]
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Smile, You're on In-Store Camera
By Erik Baard

<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54078,00.html">http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54078,00.html>

2:00 a.m. Aug. 8, 2002 PDT
Johnny Q. Consumer walks into a national chain store, picks up diapers, pays
in cash. He does not walk alone.

One store camera captures his face, while another network of cameras traces
his stroll through the aisles. The pressure-sensitive floor panels note how
he lingers and nervously shifts his feet while browsing in the diaper
section.

At the store's national headquarters, perhaps a thousand miles away, a
machine quietly notes in Johnny's file that he may be a new father. That bit
of data goes into an algorithm that a few days later cross-references birth
records and finds that, indeed, Johnny has just become the proud father of
twins. A card is sent out and special discounts will be offered the next
time he enters the store.

This scenario, which could be a harsh reality in the near future, will not
placate those who avoid shopping online and opt to pay in hard currency out
of fear for their privacy. If you can't shop anonymously at your local
retail giant, then privacy as we know it is dead.

The technology exists and its implementation could level the marketing
playing field, letting traditional businesses do what Web shopping portals
already do: follow their customers through the entire process. They would
know a lot about you, including where you come from, what you linger over,
what you add and remove from your shopping cart, what you ultimately buy,
even what you recommend to your friends.

"This is not new-fangled hardware," said Zoher Karu, director of product
management at Brickstream Corporation, a Virginia company that manufactures
the technology. "It's just cameras hooked up to PCs (that) you can buy from
Dell. We don't have proprietary hardware; we have proprietary software."

Karu explained how it works.

"The algorithm looks for shapes of people and (passes) the same individual
off from camera to camera by, for example, looking for a yellow color
leaving the left side of one camera view to enter the overlapping right side
of the next. It can distinguish between shopping cart and person, but it
doesn't know a man from a woman or a child from an adult. But certainly
that's a possibility. From an architecture standpoint, the system is capable
of that."

The privacy threat posed by this kind of monitoring, as well as the threat
from databases generated by consumer loyalty card programs, is the subject
of a paper by consumer protection advocate Katherine Albrecht that will be
published in the Denver Law Review.

But the immediate goal of Brickstream's work, said Karu, isn't to keeps tabs
on Johnny Q., but rather to improve store designs by seeing where customers
like to walk, what catches their eye and how space is being underutilized.

"How long do people wait in line? Do we need to send an alert to open
another register? What's the number of people entering the store in the
course of a day? Comment cards are not the way to measure customer data, and
you can't get that kind of data from what's coming out of the cash
register," Karu said.

Although the Brickstream system wasn't designed for security purposes, Karu
said, an algorithm could be developed to determine path choices likely to be
favored by shoplifters in a store or terrorists in an airport, while
eliminating the aspect of racial profiling.

But if Brickstream's system could be linked to facial recognition software,
conceded Karu, it could be used to zero in on specific individuals.

"It's certainly a possibility that you could cater to a loyal customer,"
Karu said. "If my high-spending customers are waiting in this long line and
I don't care as much about the other customers, I could provide a special
service."

Maybe, but other companies and research labs are even more insistent that
their technologies aren't meant to pry into personal lives and daily
routines, even if it's in the public space of a store.

The best-known facial recognition company, Identix (formerly Visionics),
said through a representative that it "would definitely not support use of
the technology in this way because of privacy concerns. This (Identix)
system is absolutely meant only to spot bad guys and find missing children."

The originator of the pressure-sensitive magic carpet and Doppler radar
upper-body-movement detector, MIT Media Lab researcher Joe Paradisso, said
his inspiration had nothing to do with consumerism.

"I was thinking of music. I never thought about this for retail at all,"
said Paradisso, who has designed performance spaces where footsteps trigger
bass or percussive sounds and torso, head and arm movements elicit higher,
"twinkling" notes.

But Paradisso sees how sensitive floor tiles or carpets can provide "robust
data" for retailers.

"Cameras have problems," he said. "They get confused when the light's
changing, and by people, clutter and things moving around in a space. Just
measuring impacts on the floor removes a lot of ambiguity, like tracking
aircraft with a radar blip."

Then again, having algorithms recognize people from one day to the next
using just footsteps as data is difficult, if not impossible. A person's
stride can change dramatically due to the shopper carrying packages, wearing
different shoes, walking with somebody else or even simply operating on low
blood sugar one morning and feeling peppy the next.

"Systems have to work together because they all have their weaknesses,"
Paradisso said. In other words, given help from facial-recognition software,
floor sensors would do a much better job of discreetly building a database
on a particular customer.

Still, just because they might have this technology, should marketers use
it?

"I think the key is for retailers to not get caught up in the hype of new
technology and look (instead) at what benefits consumers," said Priscilla
Donegan, communications director for Cap Gemini Ernst Young. "They have to
think beyond their own strategic imperatives and consider the consumer when
assessing their IT plans. I think that's a point often missed, based on our
research."

Donegan recalled a decade ago, when retailers experimented with jingles and
audio sales pitches that came from store shelves when motion sensors were
tripped.

"The reaction among consumers was not particularly positive," Donegan said.
"It was an invasion of space and time, and we really donšt want to be sung
to in the grocery aisles."

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