Retail cam mixes surveillance with sales

Mahesh Sharma
September 12, 2012
The Age

Retailers have started tracking in-store shopper movements as a way to increase profits but privacy experts believe the industry needs to come clean about the covert sales tactics.

Matthew Binns more than halved the number of security cameras at the Robin Hood and Glynn pubs in South Australia, by installing 18 Mobotix cameras which provide greater coverage with 360 degree viewing angles. The move was designed make the premises more secure, triggering alarms if people were “casing the joint”, but new software allows the company to use the cameras to track customer movements in order to boost sales.

Binns has already maximised sales potential using data from the camera software to redesign the bottle shop layout and relocate particular products. Store owners can track the numbers and movements of customers, and a heat map displays the most popular parts of the store. More sophisticated features are in the pipeline.

“It gives us a traditional security camera aspect but it gives us more,” Binns said. “The heat maps show the ant trail [of customer movements] that happens throughout your venue which means we can put a greater emphasis on retail displays for gross profit.”

In 2010 the World Privacy Forum published the The One Way Mirror Society report which explored whether security footage could be used for marketing purposes, according to executive director Pam Dixon. This was an unimaginable scenario at the time but industry won the race to the bottom.

WPF has just finished another report about retailers using security cameras to boost sales, a market led by technology vendors RetailNext in the US and by the German-based Mobotix in Australia. She said these companies should follow the lead of competitor Euclid Elements that allows customers to opt out of being monitored by retailers.

Euclid Elements’s technology tracks shoppers via the Wi-Fi signals emitted by their iPhones, rather than security cameras. It offers the option to opt out, but shoppers need to follow several prompts to achieve this.

“This is a very new industry, and it’s a little bit cowboy and Indians, and there’s a lot of people doing things just because they can,” Dixon said.
“I think it’s incredibly important to offer consumers this choice about how the information they’re dropping like digital breadcrumbs gets picked up and used. I think all companies should offer [opt-out].”

Mobotix started its life building rugged cameras but quickly expanded into the high-end security market where its 3 megapixel cameras produce an image quality that claims to be 30 times better than competitors, according to managing director Asia Pacific Graham Wheeler. The company just released the Mobotix Analytics software to extract sales information from the network-enabled cameras, so store owners can use the security footage and the data to boost sales.

Wheeler said current legislation limits how the cameras are used. In states that have outlawed audio recording, Mobotix mutes the camera’s microphone, he said.
“The same thing can be done with the video footage. You can obscure it, you can lock out people from viewing it, you can stop it from recording, so it’s not recording.”

Binns plans to use the tracking software in the hotels’ gaming rooms in Adelaide. He believes the cameras are a better way to service customers.

“We’re not identifying individuals. All we are identifying is a group of individuals that en masse are moving around,” he said. “We talk about the heat maps, we don’t see the need of identifying an individual.

WPF’s Dixon said at a minimum customers should have the ability to opt-out of tracking technologies.

“Things have changed and I recognise that, but I also recognise that people value having a sense of personal privacy and control over their information. There needs to be a balance between just grabbing anything you can and not doing anything at all. I think the balance is definitely disclosing to consumers and just being transparent to consumers.”

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