Eavesdropping Whilst You're Shopping: Balancing Personalisation and Privacy in Connected Retail Spaces

Physical retailers, who once led the way in tracking with loyalty cards and `reverse appends', now lag behind online competitors. Yet we might be seeing these tables turn, as many increasingly deploy technologies ranging from simple sensors to advanced emotion detection systems, even enabling them to tailor prices and shopping experiences on a per-customer basis. Here, we examine these in-store tracking technologies in the retail context, and evaluate them from both technical and regulatory standpoints. We first introduce the relevant technologies in context, before considering privacy impacts, the current remedies individuals might seek through technology and the law, and those remedies' limitations. To illustrate challenging tensions in this space we consider the feasibility of technical and legal approaches to both a) the recent `Go' store concept from Amazon which requires fine-grained, multi-modal tracking to function as a shop, and b) current challenges in opting in or out of increasingly pervasive passive Wi-Fi tracking. The `Go' store presents significant challenges with its legality in Europe significantly unclear and unilateral, technical measures to avoid biometric tracking likely ineffective. In the case of MAC addresses, we see a difficult-to-reconcile clash between privacy-as-confidentiality and privacy-as-control, and suggest a technical framework which might help balance the two. Significant challenges exist when seeking to balance personalisation with privacy, and researchers must work together, including across the boundaries of preferred privacy definitions, to come up with solutions that draw on both technology and the legal frameworks to provide effective and proportionate protection. Retailers, simultaneously, must ensure that their tracking is not just legal, but worthy of the trust of concerned data subjects.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the PETRAS/IoTUK/IET Living in the Internet of Things Conference, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 March 201

The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things

Retail managers’ preparedness to capture customers’ emotions: a new synergistic framework to exploit unstructured data with new analytics

Although emotions have been investigated within strategic management literature from an internal perspective, managers’ ability and willingness to understand consumers’ emotions, with emphasis on the retail sector, is still a scarcely explored theme in management research. The aim of this paper is to explore the match between the supply of new analytical tools and retail managers’ attitudes towards new tools to capture customers’ emotions. To this end, Study 1 uses machine learning algorithms to develop a new system to analytically detect emotional responses from customers’ static images (considering the exemplar emotions of happiness and sadness), whilst Study 2 consults management decision-makers to explore the practical utility of such emotion recognition systems, finding a likely demand for a number of applications, albeit tempered by concern for ethical issues. While contributing to the retail management literature with regard to customers’ emotions and big data analytics, the findings also provide a new framework to support retail managers in using new analytics to survive and thrive in difficult times

IDENTIFYING PREFERENCES THROUGH MOUSE CURSOR MOVEMENTS – PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE

Identifying customers’ preferences is a challenging task with significant practical implications for online shopping. Current methods often put considerable burden on the customers through such methods as questioning, so the process could benefit from a more accurate and less intrusive estimation of how customers weight product attributes, particularly in the initial purchasing phase. Our goal is to derive attribute weights automatically by recording and analyzing cursor movements. We conducted an experiment to confirm the suitability of the proposed design, and found a highly significant correlation between the time people spend investigating a product attribute and their self-reported importance rating. Our proposed Web page design might also reduce the risk of information overload

Police Body Worn Cameras and Privacy: Retaining Benefits While Reducing Public Concerns

Recent high-profile incidents of police misconduct have led to calls for increased police accountability. One proposed reform is to equip police officers with body worn cameras, which provide more reliable evidence than eyewitness accounts. However, such cameras may pose privacy concerns for individuals who are recorded, as the footage may fall under open records statutes that would require the footage to be released upon request. Furthermore, storage of video data is costly, and redaction of video for release is time-consuming. While exempting all body camera video from release would take care of privacy issues, it would also prevent the public from using body camera footage to uncover misconduct. Agencies and lawmakers can address privacy problems successfully by using data management techniques to identify and preserve critical video evidence, and allowing non-critical video to be deleted under data-retention policies. Furthermore, software redaction may be used to produce releasable video that does not threaten the privacy of recorded individuals

Potential applications for virtual and augmented reality technologies in sensory science

peer-reviewedSensory science has advanced significantly in the past decade and is quickly evolving to become a key tool for predicting food product success in the marketplace. Increasingly, sensory data techniques are moving towards more dynamic aspects of sensory perception, taking account of the various stages of user-product interactions. Recent technological advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality have unlocked the potential for new immersive and interactive systems which could be applied as powerful tools for capturing and deciphering the complexities of human sensory perception. This paper reviews recent advancements in virtual and augmented reality technologies and identifies and explores their potential application within the field of sensory science. The paper also considers the possible benefits for the food industry as well as key challenges posed for widespread adoption. The findings indicate that these technologies have the potential to alter the research landscape in sensory science by facilitating promising innovations in five principal areas: consumption context, biometrics, food structure and texture, sensory marketing and augmenting sensory perception. Although the advent of augmented and virtual reality in sensory science offers new exciting developments, the exploitation of these technologies is in its infancy and future research will understand how they can be fully integrated with food and human responses. Industrial relevance: The need for sensory evaluation within the food industry is becoming increasingly complex as companies continuously compete for consumer product acceptance in today's highly innovative and global food environment. Recent technological developments in virtual and augmented reality offer the food industry new opportunities for generating more reliable insights into consumer sensory perceptions of food and beverages, contributing to the design and development of new products with optimised consumer benefits. These technologies also hold significant potential for improving the predictive validity of newly launched products within the marketplace

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Tackling food marketing to children in a digital world: trans-disciplinary perspectives. Children’s rights, evidence of impact, methodological challenges, regulatory options and policy implications for the WHO European Region

There is unequivocal evidence that childhood obesity is influenced by marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages high in saturated fat, salt and/or free sugars (HFSS), and a core recommendation of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity is to reduce children’s exposure to all such marketing. As a result, WHO has called on Member States to introduce restrictions on marketing of HFSS foods to children, covering all media, including digital, and to close any regulatory loopholes. This publication provides up-to-date information on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children and the changes that have occurred in recent years, focusing in particular on the major shift to digital marketing. It examines trends in media use among children, marketing methods in the new digital media landscape and children’s engagement with such marketing. It also considers the impact on children and their ability to counter marketing as well as the implications for children’s rights and digital privacy. Finally the report discusses the policy implications and some of the recent policy action by WHO European Member States

Eye-Tracking-Based Classification of Information Search Behavior Using Machine Learning: Evidence from Experiments in Physical Shops and Virtual Reality Shopping Environments

Classifying information search behavior helps tailor recommender systems to individual customers’ shopping motives. But how can we identify these motives without requiring users to exert too much effort? Our research goal is to demonstrate that eye tracking can be used at the point of sale to do so. We focus on two frequently investigated shopping motives: goal-directed and exploratory search. To train and test a prediction model, we conducted two eye-tracking experiments in front of supermarket shelves. The first experiment was carried out in immersive virtual reality; the second, in physical reality—in other words, as a field study in a real supermarket. We conducted a virtual reality study, because recently launched virtual shopping environments suggest that there is great interest in using this technology as a retail channel. Our empirical results show that support vector machines allow the correct classification of search motives with 80% accuracy in virtual reality and 85% accuracy in physical reality. Our findings also imply that eye movements allow shopping motives to be identified relatively early in the search process: our models achieve 70% prediction accuracy after only 15 seconds in virtual reality and 75% in physical reality. Applying an ensemble method increases the prediction accuracy substantially, to about 90%. Consequently, the approach that we propose could be used for the satisfiable classification of consumers in practice. Furthermore, both environments’ best predictor variables overlap substantially. This finding provides evidence that in virtual reality, information search behavior might be similar to the one used in physical reality. Finally, we also discuss managerial implications for retailers and companies that are planning to use our technology to personalize a consumer assistance system