Apart from that, what I try to make clear is that a major reason that this happens, why people are accepting it both online and in the store, is obfuscation. There is an incredible amount of obfuscation going on. That is, people are led to think that things work in one way when there is a whole world of other activities tracking them, and parsing them, and categorizing them, that they have no clue about.
People don’t read privacy policies. In fact, most Americans misunderstand the meaning of the phrase “privacy policy.” We did surveys in 2003, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2015 with the following question: “True or false? When a website has a privacy policy, it means the site won’t share your information with other sites without your permission.”
The answer is false—privacy policies simply mean “We’re gonna tell you what we do.” The Target privacy policy basically says, “We take everything about you, we buy everything about you if we want,” you know, that kind of stuff. The fact is that over the past 10 years or more, we have found, consistently, that way over 50 percent of Americans don’t understand the meaning of privacy policies. Between 58 and 65 percent end up saying it’s true, when it’s really false. And a large percentage say that they don’t know.
So we said to the Federal Trade Commission that if a website or a retailer’s privacy policy is not what people think it should be, then don’t let them call it a privacy policy! Get them to call it “How we use your information”! But so far, they haven’t listened.
What companies will tell you now is that the big difference between websites and what goes on in the store is that the store wants to track you, but you have to have an app on, in most cases. They would say that makes it tougher than just simply having a website, because on websites they can track you by sticking a cookie or some other tracker in and you wouldn’t even know it.
But in the store, they would say, you have to make an affirmative decision to turn on an app. Now, that app doesn’t have to be the store’s app. What’s interesting is that there are different apps that will interact with the store’s marketing dynamics that have nothing to do with the name of the store. There’s a company called InMarket which has its software in many, many different apps. So if you have, say, the Condé Nast app, it can wake up when you walk into the store and tell the store that you’re in, and what kinds of stuff to offer you, and stuff like that.
Waddell: But you have to be using that other app, right?
Turow: You have to have that other app on, yeah. But most of the apps nowadays can wake up by themselves. You don’t even necessarily have to affirmatively do it. I suspect that down the line they would like to make even more non-transparent.
What companies do, since a lot of people don’t have apps for certain stores, is that they send you a text message for a discount coupon. Then, even if you don’t have the app, you’ll put it in the phone’s wallet. The wallet, then, becomes a kind of app, and it can be set to remind you of the discount when you walk into that particular store, or even come within a certain area of that store.