Beacons and Privacy

For those who haven’t heard of beacons, they are small devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy to seamlessly interact with Bluetooth-enabled smartphones in their proximity. A popular beacon is the Apple iBeacon which is used in Apple stores and was used at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to enrich customer experiences. They are primarily used in some retail stores to provide product information and deals based on a smartphone holder’s location in the store. So, for example, a person can come up to an item in the Apple store, and get a notification on their phone with a link to get more information about that item, like the colors it come in. In such a way, retail stores are able to improve their customer retail experience. Even walking through a certain aisle can prompt a notification regarding a sale that is currently going on. Now this all sounds well and good, but do you really want to be bothered with all of this advertising? Do you want to receive notifications at every step you take in a store?

Fortunately, beacons have the capability of providing you only the information that may interest you by tracking your behavior over time and building your retail profile. They can even tap into a variety of social media platforms to determine what kinds of products you may have mentioned or liked. Great, another way to profile us, right? Well, companies are always looking for ways to learn more about their customers and what better way to do this than track their behavior in the store? Unfortunately, there may be other organizations interested in profiling us, which might concern some people.

It is hard to maintain our privacy in the information age that we currently live in. From people posting everything they do throughout the day on Twitter or Facebook to shopping on Amazon.com, we are already giving out a lot of information about ourselves. These social media networks can easily be used to profile people based on their social connections and what they post about. Adding another method of profiling us with beacons further encroaches on our privacy. The main issue, in my opinion, of building profiles of people is that they can sometimes be interpreted in the wrong way, which is probably why some people prefer to maintain their privacy. Just because I spend time near a certain item in a store doesn’t mean that I am interested in that item. I may be just waiting for a friend to meet me at that location.

The real question is how much privacy are we willing to give up for convenience’s sake? Beacons can help provide relevant information to people when it is due, but they can also be used to monitor and track behavior patterns. We definitely don’t want these patterns to be interpreted wrongly and so may wish to keep this information private. Hopefully, the use of information that such devices can provide will be transparent to the people affected by them and that it will not negatively impact them in the future. We just need to figure out at which point we say no to the harvesting of data about us.

References:

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-game-changing-nature-of-beacons

http://www.abine.com/blog/2014/ibeacon-effect-on-iphone-privacy/