Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by bdamm on Thursday October 29, 2020 @03:18PM (#24934453)

The system is apparently tracking age and gender of people visiting the information kiosk. This hardly seems like invasive tracking. Even tracking an individual's movement through the mall with the purpose of providing security and marketing analysis seems like a ho-hum no big deal to me.

If they were then taking the data and finding those people through Ring or youtube videos, sharing the pictures of people with companies to learn the earning power or tax history of a person, or using pictures of people and the store they visit to sell to Amazon or Facebook, then it would seem a step too far.

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Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by donmcronald on Thursday October 29, 2020 @06:35PM (#24936923)

> This hardly seems like invasive tracking.

For now. Give it a while and they'll be looking up your credit score as you walk through the door.

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Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by catsncomputers on Thursday October 29, 2020 @03:27PM (#24934561)

its very similar to what a company called Locarise do in Japan. It's not identifying anyone, merely seeing buyer hotspots, queues, recording visitor numbers, etc. All very valuable to a mall and imo quite harmless to the user if they are not identified

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Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by thatcat on Thursday October 29, 2020 @06:43PM (#24936995)

They could later choose to sell this data and the buyer could deanonymize it by merging it with other purchased databases.

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Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by reaperducer on Thursday October 29, 2020 @05:41PM (#24936347)

There's no such thing as anonymous data.

The ad-tech industry wouldn't exist if there was.

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Re:Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers by ebalit on Friday October 30, 2020 @03:38AM (#24939965)

There are anonymous data that are interesting for advertising. The number of people passing by a location is anonymous in itself.

It seems however that in the case of the Canadian mall implementation (or more precisely their solution provider) they stored more than this number, losing the anonymous property of a system they sold as an "Anonymous Video Analytics".

In my opinion, something should be called anonymous if and only if you cannot go back from the stored data to a personally identifiable information.

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