Imagine a future in which body implants communicate with retailers about our personal preferences for products and services. University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow joins us to talk about how companies monitor our purchases both in-store and online in order to get a better picture of our wants and needs. His new book is called “The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power” (Yale).
Joseph Turow on …
… the ways stores are profiling shoppers:
“Most people don’t realize this, but essentially the phone is an incredible marketing device. It is the most personal technology that probably ever existed in terms of electronics. People sleep with their phones. And as a consequence, marketers know this, retailers know this. It is possible when you walking through the aisle of a store, if you have your Wi-Fi on, but particularly if you have an app that relates to that store in one way or another, you can get different prices, meaning discounts, for various products depending on where you literally are in the store and what the store knows about you.”
