The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power

Concerned that consumers are being tracked digitally in physical stores as well as online, Turow (The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth) explains where, why, and how it’s happening, and what the very ill effects might be. Where includes name-brand stores such as Macy’s, Sears, Target, Walgreens, Walmart. Why has to do with retailers’ quests for higher sales and determination to outwit their online competitors. How involves an awful lot of data mining, those ubiquitous shopper “rewards” programs, and various technologies: facial recognition, GPS tracking, Bluetooth “beacons,” 3-D sensors, digital wallets, and smartphone apps that can wake themselves up and start displaying personalized promotional offers as soon as a shopper enters a store. It’s all thoroughly researched and clearly presented with detailed evidence and fascinating peeks inside the retail industry. Much of this information is startling and even chilling, particularly when Turow shows how retail data-tracking can enable discrimination and societal stratification. His troubling conclusion: “This new direction in retail may be healthy for some stores’ bottom lines,” but it is eroding the “historical ideal of egalitarian treatment in the American marketplace.” (Jan.)