Gadgets

Spying on smartphones will lead to spam after visiting stores


Recently appeared information about anonymoustechniques for spying on smartphones that communicate the tastes and needs of each particular consumer. Special applications that monitor the movements of the smartphone owner, do not need to be installed.

Everything is much simpler: Many use the services of weather forecasting or in other ways report their coordinates. So, according to experts, only in China on every smartphone there are at least 7 applications that send the current coordinates of the device. There are also companies that provide information on the movements of smartphones in more than 100,000 Chinese stores. And this information contains data about one billion devices.

& times

One of the biggest players on the market is Cosmose. This firm sells the data thus obtained to major brands like Budweiser, Subway, L’Oreal or Burberry. Private information is not collected or stored by the company. There is only a transfer route smartphone between the counters in the store. The accuracy with which positioning is determined has a radius of 1.8 meters. This is enough to determine the basic things: for example, a person came into the fitting room, but did not go to the cashier. Also, such surveillance will determine the positions and places that most interested the owner of the smartphone at a certain moment. Thanks to such a system, it is possible to target advertising to people as efficiently as possible. It is already used in China. And as experience has shown, thanks to her, the passerby can quickly turn into a buyer.


Being successful in China, Cosmose is alreadyis committed to the US market. In this country, anonymous information about the movements of smartphones is collected by approximately 75 companies. About 200 million gadgets are tracked. Corporations of the size of Google and Facebook are ready to purchase data of this kind.


Advertising market based on surveillancesmartphones, this year alone can reach $ 21 billion. So, many will want to follow the increasing number of visitors to stores. According to experts, on this background, the desire for privacy on the part of most users has been replaced by indifference: they say, and so everyone knows everything about everything. Departing from anonymity, people are increasingly choosing comfort.

Source: cnbc.com