Smart Phones: Profiling You for Businesses

It isn't only government invading your privacy, as Elizabeth Dwoskin explains in this WSJ article, What Secrets Your Phone is Sharing About You:

Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood. And he gleans this information without his customers' knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.

Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.

The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people's habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs. [snip]

Turnstyle's weekly reports to clients use aggregate numbers and don't include people's names. But the company does collect the names, ages, genders, and social media profiles of some people who log in with Facebook to a free Wi-Fi service that Turnstyle runs at local restaurants and coffee shops, including Happy Child. It uses that information, along with the wider foot traffic data, to come up dozens [of] lifestyle categories, including yoga-goers, people who like theater, and hipsters. [snip]

Viasense Inc., another Toronto startup, is building detailed dossiers of people's lifestyles by merging location data with those from other sources, including marketing firms. The company follows between 3 million and 6 million devices each day in a 400-kilometer radius surrounding Toronto. It buys bulk phone-signal data from Canada's national cellphone carriers. Viasense's algorithms then break those users into lifestyle categories based on their daily travels, which it says it can track down to the square meter.

Viasense doesn't gather personal information or know any of its users' names, but CEO Mossab Basir says it is simple to figure this out. A person who has enabled location services on an app in which they upload information publicly, such as Twitter is broadcasting their location and their identity—or at least their handle—at the same time. "People are probably unaware of how much they are making available," says Mr. Basir. "That's why it's a very delicate subject for us. It's kind of Big Brotheresque." [snip]

Places where people didn't think they were being watched are now repositories for collecting information, says Ryan Calo assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law. "Companies are increasingly able to connect between our online and offline lives," he says.