FTC hits retail firm for secretly tracking customers

Source: Computerworld

A company that tracked retail store customers through their smartphones without notifying them and without giving them a chance to turn off the tracking has settled a U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint that it didn't live up to its privacy promises.

Retail tracking firm Nomi Technologies stated in its privacy policy from late 2012 that it would provide a customer opt-out mechanism at stores using its tracking services, thus implying that it would notify customers of the tracking efforts, the FTC said. But the company did not give customers an opt-out option and did not notify customers they were being tracked, the agency said Thursday.

Nomi collected information on about 9 million mobile devices during the first nine months of 2013, according to a complaint filed by the agency.

... Nomi installs sensors in its clients' stores that collect the MAC addresses of store customers' mobile devices as the devices search for Wi-Fi networks. Nomi partially obscures, or hashes, the MAC addresses before storing them, but the process produces an identifier that is unique to a consumer's mobile device and can be tracked over time, the FTC said.

Read more: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2914078/data-privacy/ftc-hits-retail-firm-for-secretly-tracking-customers.html