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AudibleNod t1_j6dwwja wrote

Can't they also pick up bluetooth IDs and see how long someone lingers and where?

if not, I'm sorry for giving them the idea.

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SCMtnGuy t1_j6dygr1 wrote

Yeah, many of them use already bluetooth beacons. You don't even need to connect. They use signal strength and UUIDs to know your proximity and identity, then this is tied back to all the information harvested from other sources to profile you.

All of this should be illegal. But, until Congress grows some balls and passes actual privacy laws, this is another good reason to keep bluetooth, wifi, NFC, and other modes of transmission off on your phone unless you're specifically using it for something at that moment.

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human8264829264 OP t1_j6dxdmk wrote

Probably, learned about this in a marketing class last week when they where telling us that sometimes they deploy those mannequins and spy on shoppers in real time to analyze their behavior and product reactions, and that includes listening to their conversations.

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SCMtnGuy t1_j6eus5i wrote

These beacons are also sometimes used in window displays, seasonal displays, end of row displays, and other non-mannequin ways, so it's not just mannequins you have to worry about. Shopping malls and grocery stores are also turning into marketing panopticons. Basically, everyone in real life wants to imitate the level of customer spying Amazon can achieve, and it gets buzz with senior management because it promises enhanced revenue. I suspect it's actually mostly useless garbage data, honestly, but I do my best to deny data harvesting from me anyway.

It sucks, though... I shouldn't have to be at war with my own consumer electronics products, yet I am. Keeping up with the ways in which advertisers and marketers, and all their middle men, abuse access to my information is tiring, and many days I feel like just chucking my phone into the nearest ravine and telling everyone if they need to get ahold of me, write me a letter, the ancient on-paper kind.

This is especially depressing to me, personally, because I was on the team that developed the first successful fully integrated digital cell phone controller IC. All of us engineers were enthusiastic about it and imagined a future of information at your fingertips, the greatest library of human knowledge in every pocket, and the positive effects that this democratization of information access would have. But, this was before the rise of surveillence capitalism, before gatekeeping on technical knowledge (go fuck yourself, Elsevier) and before the new cold war of social media driven disinformation campaigns.

Now it's all garbage, just a big, sad pile of bullshit information being jacked from everyone and uselessly twaddled with "AI" and "Machine Learning" algorithms to produce dubuous marketing information that primarily serves to justify legions of bullshit jobs, in the Graeber sense of the word.

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