Intermediate 
Behind the bright lights and mirrored panels, cameras are watching you. If you pick up a boot, a camera will make sure you dont put it into your bag. Enter a department store and you will be watched. But new technology is less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex and shopping habits.
A few months ago, IT company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) wrote a report that said around 30% of stores use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database. It uses devices such as Intel RealSense cameras, which are able to analyse everything from particular expressions to the clothing brands someone is wearing.
Intel spokesman Joe Jensen says that the aim of using RealSense technology in shops is not to create databases of speci c peoples lives but to build generalized models of peoples lifestyles and shopping habits. We dont need to know a particular customer. We need to know that this shopper has these characteristics and that, when those characteristics are present, this is what a person tends to do.
If you combine recognition technology with databases of previous customer patterns, you can start to predict a lot about what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, for example, theres a woman walking quickly towards the sock section, you can use that data to predict she wants to buy socks. That could allow a store to automatically put targeted ads on screens aimed speci cally at that person. If she looks like the type of person who wants to buy socks, they will show her adverts for socks.
If it sounds familiar, its because the online world has been using techniques like these for years. If you search for something on Amazon, youll get targeted ads for similar products on other sites. But its not easy to bring these systems into the physical world. People do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to browser cookies.
Hoxton Analytics, a team of data scientists in London, has developed a technology that uses machine learning and arti cial intelligence to categorize people based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of peoples footwear as they walk past the sensor, the system can identify a customers gender with 75-80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that the focus of the system was partly a reaction to facial recognition. My idea was, why dont we simply consider the clothes someones wearing? he said. If I just showed you a photo of someones body, you could probably tell me what gender they are. However, pointing a camera at someones chest or hips feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was  what about peoples shoes?
People use the word creepy a lot during discussions of in-store tracking. For stores and data scientists, the aim is to  nd a way of getting information without seeming intrusive.
For McCormack, the argument is based on the fact that personal information isnt collected. Right now, shops are doing lots of incredibly invasive things but we just dont know about it. What we say is that, if you know someones a male or a female, then your advertising will be much more ef cient. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, youll be advertising PlayStations not hairdryers.
From the perspective of stores, its understandable that physical shops want some of the information online shops collect. We allow this to happen online so why not of ine? Online, you get a pop-up asking you to accept cookies. But you cant ask for peoples consent in the same way when they move from one physical shop to another.
But its also true that the generation that is growing up with online shopping does not see online advertising as so invasive. In the CSC report, a survey showed that 72% of people aged 55 or more said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies in physical shops. But only 51% of 16-24 year olds said they were uncomfortable.
Are younger people more open because they are more familiar with digital technology or do they believe in the honesty of organizations offering free services? Is this kind of technology always creepy or does it depend? In any case, there are a growing number of eyes between the shelves and they care a lot about what youre wearing.