Yuck!
However, none of this ever seems to translate into people giving Facebag the boot... Or even switching from Googhoul to DuckDuckGo (which uses the former anyway apparently :(
Facebook to stalk shoppers
Facebook will now follow its users around while they're out shopping so it can tell companies if anyone cares about their ads. The social network said that it will let advertisers know how many people visited a store after seeing an ad by tracking folks via their phones' locations: Historically, it has been difficult to …
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Friday 17th June 2016 06:12 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: Yuck!
It is uninstalled on all phones in my household and none of the members of the household makes use of it.
I explained to the kids how Facebook in detail makes money and some of the more entertaining uses of said service like "burglary target observation", "extortion", etc and they suddenly lost any interest in having it enabled.
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Friday 17th June 2016 05:48 GMT Francis Vaughan
Lunacy.
This is going to be a self inflicted wound of mortal proportions.
The absolute last thing any purveyor of ads ever wants its customers to know, is how much that customer's adverts did for them. Because the answer is - nowhere near as much as the money spent would justify. Ad effectiveness is the big secret. Letting that particular cat out of the bag could ruin Facebook and Google overnight.
This is probably a good thing.
More likely, the system will quietly be decommissioned when the first round of deeply embarrassing results start to appear.
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Friday 17th June 2016 11:18 GMT tiggity
false positives
Lots of potential to be erroneous, unless being v.precise on GPS & still a dwell time based issue of what constitutes a shopping visit e.g. if dwell time set quite long then a focused quick go in shop & buy 1 item visit would not be recorded, could be ironic is that was advertised item
False positive visits typical
e.g. I use car park of a store as it's handy free parking whilst I go elsewhere & leave phone in car so looks like I spent a while there.
e.g. I visit car park of a store because it has recycling facilities & spend time there disposing of paper, card, glass etc - enough time to equate to a quick store visit.
e.g. Store has petrol station - I am queuing for pump then getting petrol, not doing shopping.
Lots of reasons for phone to be in vicinity of a shop even though I'm not shopping there.
If I do actually shop in the store, how will they know what I am buying relates to an ad in any way whatsoever?
All irrelevant as obviously I have a face book free phone
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Friday 17th June 2016 11:39 GMT Kane
Re: false positives
You assume that they will only be relying on GPS data; what about if the phone's WiFi connection is on and 'just happens' to connect to that shops/petrol station/supermarket stores/shopping centre's router? You then have two layers of data to correlate with, thereby building a more coherent picture.
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Friday 17th June 2016 11:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
"If I do actually shop in the store, how will they know what I am buying relates to an ad in any way whatsoever?"
Any non-cash payment, or loyalty card, should allow a store to know who you are and what you bought. By proximity correlation they could then also deduce your Facebook identity. CCTV in the store could be time correlated with you using the check-out - and image recognition could then play a part to establish further details like probable age.
Even if you try to stay anonymous there is no real reason why your face image can't be matched on Facebook pictures - even if you have no account yourself. Other people's unthinking actions can undo your attempts to preserve your privacy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
