The data protection directive as applied to internet protocol (IP) addresses: uniting the perspective of the European commission with the jurisprudence of member states

What if your friendly neighborhood mall owner could boost revenue by following your every step around the mall as you shop? Forest City, a shopping mall real estate company that owns malls from California to Virginia, has done exactly this.1 Capitalizing on the fact that virtually everyone carries a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The George Washington journal of international law and economics 2013-01, Vol.45 (3), p.579-579
Main Author: Litvinov, Aleksandr
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
California
Europe
European Commission
Jurisprudence
Member states
Shopping
U.S.A
Virginia
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:What if your friendly neighborhood mall owner could boost revenue by following your every step around the mall as you shop? Forest City, a shopping mall real estate company that owns malls from California to Virginia, has done exactly this.1 Capitalizing on the fact that virtually everyone carries a cell phone today, Forest City distributed monitoring units throughout two of its malls in order to pick up shoppers' cell phone signals.2 This allowed them to record the movement of customers by triangulating the strength of those cell phone signals in relation to the monitoring units.3 The data, a very accurate record of where a particular cell phone has been in physical space, is analyzed by software and the reports are then available for sale to retailers in the mall.4 Shopper response metrics are among the valuable information, revealing how many people walked past a particular display or ad, how many people stopped to linger near the ad, and how many people actually then visited the store associated with the ad.5 Cell phone signal fingerprints contain unique identifiers, enabling measurement of responses to ads by individual shoppers on a single visit or over a period of time, assuming they carry the same cell phone during each visit.6
ISSN:0748-4305