This is an important update to one of
the our most popular article series of 2013 entitled, “Is Privacy the
New Luxury Expenditure?” This article is about the challenge of keeping
your smartphone privacy-safe, not just your computers.
Several new startups are popping up that
can, through sensors, track your physical location down to the square
meter when you have Wi-Fi enabled on your smartphone. One company has
placed sensors in about 200 local businesses in a Canadian city within a
one-mile radius that track the whereabouts of shoppers, unknowingly, as they move around town.
These companies know which gym you
frequent, which coffee shops and restaurants you visit, which movies you
see, on a certain day. They can sense if you are just window-shopping
or if you actually come into the store immediately afterwards.
It is not just the raw information they
glean that is most alarming. It is what the information means.
Algorithms can determine if you are a jogger if they can track your
movements across a park between certain times of the day. They can
determine where you live based on where you are during the hours when
you sleep. They can determine your age by the hours you spend at a
certain school.
It is one thing for restaurant owners to
know how many of their customers in general are from an upscale
neighborhood. It is another if they can identify YOU in particular as
living in that neighborhood.
When you log into “free” Wi-Fi using
Facebook, at a coffee shop that subscribes to these marketing services,
for example, they do collect your name, your age, your gender, and have
access to your social media profile. By cross-referencing your
whereabouts with your PERSONAL profile they can learn way too much
without your consent, just by inference!
As a luxury real estate marketing
professional, ask yourself this question: "What if that coffee shop
owner is a potential client who is choosing between you and your
competition?
Be deliberate about enabling Wi-Fi on
your phones. Understand that when you login to Wi-Fi using Facebook
that you might be giving personal information away. This information may
be innocuous in and of itself. But, it can also be analyzed and
aggregated by powerful computers that correlate this information with
data about your whereabouts at certain times that accurately yields
additional meanings.
And, remember that privacy is indeed a luxury.
Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-
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