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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 26 2017, @06:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the extrovert-v.-introvert dept.

Shops and retailers are taking over where street cameras left off, watching shoppers' every move.

According to a 2015 survey of 150 retail executives from IT services firm Computer Services Corporation, a quarter of all British shops and 59% of fashion retailers use facial recognition software. Such technology is vital as offline stores attempt to keep up with online retailers, said Duncan Mann, chief operating officer at retail analysis firm Hoxton Analytics. "Online retailers gather all kinds of information about shoppers and physical stores also want to understand how people behave in a shop," he said. But, he admits: "A lot of these technologies are kind of invasive."

Hoxton has come up with a novel way of measuring footfall - literally by filming people's shoes. Sherlock Holmes-like, its system can deduce a remarkable amount of information such as age, gender and social class of shoppers from their footwear. "We have cameras at about 50cm off the ground and it points down so it is less invasive than facial recognition," he explains. It is surprisingly accurate. It spots the correct gender 80% of the time, better than some facial recognition technologies, according to Mr Mann.

Looks like this tech will arrive just after Amazon has put them all out of business.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Sunday March 26 2017, @08:06AM

    by anubi (2828) on Sunday March 26 2017, @08:06AM (#484302) Journal

    Interesting.

    I was looking at the SIM card setups in the phone. Its a GSM phone and has two SIM slots. I have the AT&T sim in one and a TING (T-Mobile network) SIM card in the other.

    My own observations - in my location - is that AT&T is way more robust, and that T-Mobile service ( as resold by TING ) is way cheaper, but often not available. So I swap between the two according as to where I am, knowing I will pay through the nose for AT&T - but they are often the only game in town. So I pay their $25 fee every three months for backup in case I am out of T-Mobile coverage area.

    The way this phone is set up, it tracks the amount of data usage as overview, AT&T and TING. On the SIM card setup, I have all data routed through AT&T, and Data Usage tab shows over 40MB of data went through AT&T, and 1.8MB went through TING.

    I can account for that 1.8MB, as I did switch over to TING data last week when I had to call AAA to help me with my van ( I locked the keys in it... ), and when I called AAA, they gave me a website to go to make things go smoother. I did, via TING, and apparently they not only got my location but also gave me where the rescue truck was. Pretty clever if I say so myself.

    I do note the phone always seems to know where it is ( Google Maps - Blue Dot ).

    I thought it was the onboard GPS chipset this phone is alleged to have, but am told this data is calculated by the carrier, as they have multiple towers receiving my phone, and they triangulate and use beamforming techniques to determine precisely where my phone is. ( (They know exactly where their towers are, and also know that the speed of light is constant, so by looking at my signal itself - and its time of arrival to the nanosecond of when it hits each of their towers, they know pretty darn close to where I am.)

    So, to get back to your suggestion, I do not really know whether that 40Megabytes its reporting is failed communication attempts or if it was actual payload delivered.

    I do know that both my phone and TING report that I used 1.8MB of TING data - and that was over about 20 minutes of updating maps on my end showing me where the rescue truck was, and I am quite sure my location was sent the same way to the truck driver, as I saw the map on his display in his truck, and it looked a lot like my map, except my location was the circled dot. So I get the idea the accounting with TING was 1.8 MB of payload delivered. I would think that the accounting with AT&T would be likewise.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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