Until now, nearly all consumer spending has faced a final barrier that is underrated in its ability to stop the most egregious and unnecessary purchases. That barrier has been targeted by retailers for a long time, and just cracked.

Amazon has had the "Go" project in the works for quite a while. I saw it coming years ago - in successive drafts of the book, the topic went from a paragraph of "could-be" to a page of "coming soon." It sounded as loopy and absurd as many of the other things I wrote about early, like consumer tracking, food engineering for addiction and the dangers of big data. But then I saw ads for staffing Amazon's Go division last month... and here's the big reveal.

NY TImes: Inside Amazon Go, a Store of the Future

There's way too much to say about this to even try to make this a complete analysis or even informative essay, so I won't try in this pass. But this change, the elimination of the checkout, may have more effect on consumer spending resistance than many of the data- and behaviorally-driven changes in retailing before it. Oh... I don't mean it will improve consumer resistance. Quite the opposite. When everything is "free," when there's no universal and formal moment of reckoning store choices with the reality of cost... we're looking at pure hindbrain to wallet spending, free of (enough) conscious, rational consideration.

Which, of course, is nirvana for retailers. That pesky resistance of consumers, their stubbornness at not making SeeWantBuy their operating principle, has vexed marketers and sellers for generations. Now, as I noted in the developing book, we're even closer to the marketing ideal of SeeBuy, with "Want" just automatic and assumed.

This is too depressing, so let's close out with an old joke I eventually worked into the book draft and will now probably relegate to a footnote.

An old Scotsman came to America and eventually found himself in a modern grocery store. Overwhelmed at the vast range of goods, he quickly began to fill his shopping cart with glee. When there was no more room, he headed for the exit, only to find his way blocked by the checkout line. "Dom!" he cried. "Ah knew there'd be a catch!"

And to some degree, we all depend on that "catch" a little. It's not uncommon to see shoppers at Target (mostly younger, some not-so, all naive) reach the cashier with full basket, balk at the total, and slowly remove items from their order until it meets some pre-defined limit. A limit they could not seem to consider as they shopped. We can all smirk and roll our eyes at such lack of arithmetic and logic skills, but will we still be smirking when barrierless checkout becomes as common as the irritating self-checkout kiosks?

I don't know. I do know that removing the last "catch" in consumer spending represents a terrible offensive in this war, and one consumers are utterly unprepared to resist.

UPDATED - See Following

I will start by saying this post will seem terribly quaint in just a few years.

Visualize this: It's just a few years from now. You get an email coupon from a restaurant you know about but have never visited. The teaser headline reads, "So how come you keep driving by and never stop in for a piece of our real homemade lasagna?"

Which may seem a little eerie, as you do indeed drive by the place a couple of times a week, and you've been guiltily living on more frozen lasagna dinners than you'd like to admit. You've become used to ads and solicitations using awfully personal and private details about you and your life, but this one makes you glance over your shoulder to see who's watching.

Welcome to the world of consumer big data... and Vigilant Solutions, Perceptics and Motorola.

The marketing company trying to lure you into the restaurant already knows your grocery habits, because you kindly provide your ~~Rewards Card~~ tracking ID every time you load up on milk, bread, diet Pepsi, Kellogg's Corn Flakes (the 23-ounce box, not the 14-ounce one)... and Stouffer's Homestyle Lasagna dinners.

By providing your card and getting your special discounts, you're also providing the grocery store with a way to associate all your purchases with you, individually, regardless of which store you visit or how you pay. (It's illegal to track purchases by things like account or credit card numbers in most places, by the way, so that's why they push that special tracking number on you. But the benefits are great, right?) So they know that you're chowing down on four or five Homestyle Lasagnas a month. They don't much care, except to know that offering you coupons for other brands and kinds of frozen Italian dinners is likely to pay off.

The grocery store sells this information back to the major product providers. That's why you got all those offers for diet products last month, because Nestlé noted you were purchasing their Stouffer-brand calorie-fest and, charmingly, a diet drink. (From competing PepsiCo, which made their blood boil, but oh well. They'll get you next time.) So you look like a great target for pricey diet foods if they can leverage your obvious guilt against your tendency to indulge in microwave fat food.

Which doesn't explain how Mama Leone's knew about your guilty indulgence. They're independent (a rarity in these days of even small restaurant chains having very, very big parents). Did they go around asking grocery stores for lists of people who eat salty, fatty, engineered falso Italian food? No, of course not. Their marketing company asked an aggregator of consumer data like Acxiom for the information, and for a modest fee, they were happy to pull out a very selected list of people who lived in the area and regularly bought frozen Italianoid dinners. Since the grocery store and/or Nestlé, Kraft, PepsiCo et al. sell their accumulated data to these aggregators, every grocery purchase you've made for the last decade is in their big data pile, ready to be sifted, correlated and connected to provide that hypertargeted list of 500 people Mama Leone's is after. (Yes, we're talking big, big, big data.)

But wait a minute... how in the hell could Mama know you keep driving by her place?

Welcome to the world of LPR and ALPR... License Plate Recognition, and Automated License Plate Recognition. If you drive on public roads (and quite a few semi-public ones like shopping mall parking lots), you are probably in the gaze of cameras that spot your license plate, record it, and geotag it to time and location. Enough such tags, and it's possible to reconstruct a car's path, hour by hour, day after day, 366 days a leap year... all automatically and with almost as much reliability as the GPS pingers used by trucking and car rental companies. Entirely without your direct consent and almost certainly without your knowledge. (You have given your permission, though, through ignorance, apathy and misdirection.)

Companies like Vigilant Solutions developed their LPR/ALPR products for law enforcement, and sell them on the basis of efficiency and officer safety. Before you're even pulled over for ticking that yellow light, a camera has captured your plate number and the cruiser's computer has pulled up your record. The cop knows whether you're Cindy Soccermom, late for a game, or a dangerous felon likely to make the cop's day a very bad one. It's hard to argue with the intent of scenarios like this... but if your Fourth Amendment bone isn't tickling, you're probably one of those who has nothing to hide and thus no worries about cops randomly searching your property.

Some jurisdictions allow LPR to be used only like a radar gun — under the active and selective control of a trained user and with at least some trace of probable cause. Many, however, have enabled fully automatic systems that target and collect every license plate that comes within view. If you're a wanted man, don't drive your own car around, because the first State Police cruiser that gets a glimpse of your plate (even while the driver is otherwise occupied) is going to sound the alarm. Ditto for those of you with expired registrations, if the cop who spots you isn't doing anything more important that moment.

...But I'm going to stop there on that track. Renegade Consumer is not about Fourth Amendment issues or the debates of modern law enforcement... or even the use of such data by government. I'm not saying the practices are good or bad; go investigate and take your own stand if you like. However, we've reached an important border in renegade issues and need to turn aside in order to stay on track.

That track is that this same system, same automated collection of geotagged license plate data, is available to and used by private industry. The data aggregators include this growing base of information about vehicle locations and movements. It is now possible for private entities, answering to no one but their owners and stockholders, to track individual vehicles with a precision and scope we might have found frightening in the hands of the FBI, CIA, UNCLE or even S.H.I.E.L.D. a few years ago. (Since the aggregators are also tracking detailed purchase information, it is not hard to associate the vehicle movements with individuals making the purchases, taking the surveillance to a deeper level. Don't pretend it wasn't you that stopped at Goldie's Adult Novelties last Friday afternoon, with your hoodie pulled low, and paid $127.43 in cash for... well, I'll keep your secret. It's a good look on you, though. So cute.)

So when the marketing whiz for Mama Leone's requested the targeting data, he framed the request to include people who had bought frozen Italian, lived within a 5-mile radius and had a record of driving by regularly. Lucky you was one of the 500 or so... and damn if you aren't thinking about the special lasagna deal there right now.

It is this invasion of privacy, the glassification of our domicile walls, the perpetual body-scanning of our every action, and the aggregation of all this data to no purpose but to find a more efficient way to extract money from us, that Renegade Consumer strenuously opposes. We'll leave the mirror issues in government and law enforcement to others, but want to make it clear that whatever the sins of the state are in tracking individuals in this manner, they are tenfold when used by private industry for purely profit-driven purposes. If we do not give law enforcement the right to follow and search us without cause, how can we tolerate the marketing-industrial complex doing the same just to shake us down a little more efficiently?

Even if we do judge it appropriate for civic forces to use this capability, how does that justify its use to further control us as economic individuals? When did the last bastions of privacy fall to the assault on our right to economic self-determination? And what are we going to do about it, fellow renegades?

(So, yes, this post will seem terribly quaint and obvious in a few years... but don't go away with any idea that this is a projection about future tech. All of the above exists now. All of the above is being used exactly as described... it just isn't very widespread back here in mid-2014. How are things going a few years ahead? Start that diet yet? Does the costume still fit?)

April, 2019

...And An Update, Five Years On

An article in the New York Times outlines the rising problems with privacy, individual liberty and personal safety related to automated plate tracking.

This op-ed neatly sums up where reliance on automated plate tracking has led to burderline Fourth Amendment violations, and innocent drivers being placed in terrifying situations because of misinformation.

Can a tragic, possibly fatal incident based on such misuse of wholesale individual tracking be far behind?

Category: Consumer Privacy

And the last barrier begins to fall…