Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
Find out exactly how retailers are gathering intelligence on you to give to database corporations that pass it along to the NSA.
How Cisco Gathers Intelligence on You to Share With the NSA
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How Cisco Gathers Intelligence on You to Share With the NSA
Nordstrom has employed a surveillance program that uses customer’s smartphones to track their movements through the store using Wi-Fi signals.
Whether or not the customer has their smartphone on or not, the technology can ping-back from the cell phone to create detailed information regarding where the customer is, how long they are in a section of the store before purchasing an item, and how long a customer remains in the store before leaving.
This experiment is part of a move by major retailers to gather information on in-store shoppers and their behavior, moods. By using surveillance equipment, like CCTV cameras, and tapping into Wi-Fi signals from smartphones.
RetailNext (RN) is a corporation that takes shopper information from smartphones and analyzes it for patterns in customers.
Tim Callan, chief marketing officer for RN, explained: “If a shopper’s phone is set to look for Wi-Fi networks, a store that offers Wi-Fi can pinpoint where the shopper is in the store, within a 10-foot radius, even if the shopper does not connect to the network.”
Alexel Agratchev , chief executive officer and co-founder of RN is also the general manager of Emerging Technologies Group (ETG), “an internal startup within Cisco.”
RN specializes in collecting and analyzing “information available inside their own stores.”
They work with other tech corporations such as:
• Oracle
• Salesforce
• Cisco
• Motorola
• IBM
• Symantic
• Intel
• shopperTrak
• VeriSign
• Palm Computing
• Accentura
Some of the top-retailers in the industry employ their services; such as:
• Saks Fifth Avenue
• Tiffany & Co.
• Bloomingdales
• Macy’s
• Lancôme
• Polo Ralph lauren
• Tommy Hilfiger
• L’Oreal
• Unilever
• Colgate
Guido Iquret, head of the ETG, “Brick-and-mortar stores have been disadvantaged compared with online retailers, which get people’s digital crumbs,” said Guido Jouret, the head of Cisco’s emerging technologies group, which supplies tracking cameras to stores. Why, Mr. Jouret asked, should physical stores not “be able to tell if someone who didn’t buy was put off by prices, or was just coming in from the cold?”
Cisco publically denied that they give information to the National Security Agency (NSA) after being accused of data mining and sharing with the PRISM program.
Cisco said: “PRISM is not a Cisco program and Cisco networks did not participate in the program. Further, Cisco does not monitor communications of private citizens or government organizations in China or anywhere in the world.”
In June, Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, claimed that Cisco was in fact contributing information to the NSA through PRISM.
The connection between Cisco and data mining is the RN Corporation that works with major retailers in spying on customers for the sake of marketing.
However, this information could also be used for profiling; much as the NSA has been caught doing. The surveillance programs that profile Americans are creating database information that is stored and could be used at a later date for any purpose the federal government deems appropriate.