This is a summary of the book “The Aisles have eyes: How retailers track your shopping, strip your privacy and define your power” written University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph Turow and published by Yale University Press in 2017. He writes about a father who first learned of his teen aged daughter’s pregnancy when Target mailed maternity related sales offer to his home. How could the department store know that she was pregnant before her family knew. His report includes data collection by both online and brick-and-mortar stores, their ways to collect the data not just from their own site but also from the smartphones, wi-fi, camera, GPS, and other devices of their customers, the combination of tracking with data mined from sources to mailing out coupons, as well as the indoctrination of individuals to accept growing levels of intrusion.

Surveillance technology yields data that becomes proprietary, but retailers also ensure that customers are comfortable giving away data. For example, rewards program requires you to sign up. Privacy advocates are generally concerned about monitoring, but their alarms are largely subdued. Smartphones, with their ubiquity, enable even physical retailers to collect data and this helps them to identify their most valuable customers. Marketers even hope that wearable technology will provide a constant stream of customer activity. With customers becoming more insensitive, the data generation ever increasing, and the promiscuous monitoring pose insurmountable challenges to the government and privacy advocates to draft and enforce regulations.

In the early 21st century, traditional retail stores had to adapt their business models to compete with online retailers like Amazon. To do so, they needed to replicate e-stores' tracking and targeting in the real world, mining databases to discriminate among customers and send personalized advertisements and offers. This required a new level of surveillance and intrusion into customers' personal lives. Retailers had to get consumers comfortable with this kind of tracking and accept that giving confidential information is a normal part of their shopping.

These retailers focused on niche markets to compete with Walmart, whose purchasing clout and efficiency made competing on price an impossible task. To identify valuable niche customers, retailers had to collect data on shoppers. Data companies like ShopperTrak and Euclid offer technology that enables stores to exploit Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to link with shoppers' smartphones. InMarket offers a tactic using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, where stores install inexpensive BLE "beacons" on the selling floor to detect inMarket's code in smartphone apps.

In 2010, smartphone manufacturers equipped their products with GPS chips, enabling retailers to track shoppers beyond their stores. InMarket and xAd track consumers' locations and deduce their reasons for being in a store, providing retailers with clues to the most promising advertising targets. Retailers may eventually be able to follow customers into their homes by exploiting "the Internet of things" networks of smart appliances and remote-control devices. Wearable technology like the Apple Watch and facial recognition can help gather continual data on habits, location, buying patterns, and health. Retailers are also implementing a hidden curriculum, teaching customers to give up personal information and accept surveillance and discrimination in exchange for convenience and coupons. This includes redefining customer loyalty by offering discounts and other perks to good customers. Discriminating retailers are building profiles of individual shoppers and using statistical analysis to rate their attractiveness, targeting the most attractive customers with offers and discounts designed to keep them coming back.

Such retailers value influential customers based on their influence and spending power. They assess this by identifying customers with the most people in their social networks and cross-referencing this information with data from a tool called Radian6. However, consumers have little input into retailing's transformation, as they have little choice but to accept the retailer's "privacy policy." Surveys show that most consumers want more control over their information, but are unaware of the mechanisms behind data mining, the government's ability to protect their privacy, and are uncomfortable with tracking. New regulations could slow the progress of retail monitoring, but the best approach would be to require an opt-in for every company that collects consumer data. Students should learn digital media and marketing from middle school, and the public should be educated about marketers' hidden agendas and privacy policies. Paying attention to the privacy policy and opting out of unwanted agreements is a good practice for individual customers.

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