Manipulation

A correspondent has drawn my attention to the article at reference 1. The burden of which seems to be that through various more or less shady transactions in the tech world, some companies in the shops business - possibly mainly in the US - are able to track my every movement when I am in one of their shops. Given their prior knowledge of my shopping behaviour and the layout of said shops, they are then able to manipulate my subsequent behaviour by sending me text and email messages.

We are told that '... [the necessary] beacons are [also] placed at airports, malls, subways, buses, taxis, sporting arenas, gyms, hotels, hospitals, music festivals, cinemas and museums, and even on billboards...'. They are all at it, but the shops seem to be the big players.

The good news is that all this works through the apps which one has loaded on one's mobile phone. So, since in our case we have Microsoft phones which barely do apps and for added protection BH never takes hers out or turns it on, I think we escape the attention of these nosey parkers. The question is should we care? After all, we used to regard it as a good thing when we believed in a Lord who was tracking our every move and chalking them all up in his big book against the day of judgement. With his moving interest being that he was a glutton for idolatry. He needed a rich diet of prayers and adulation - not so unlike some of the players in our real world.

And most of us regard the manipulations practised by the staff of restaurants and bars to get us to buy more stuff, to spend more money, as more or less fair play. Ditto all the ads pumped onto our mobiles and laptops through the good offices (and extensive knowledge of our online habits) of Google and others. Some of these last are even helpful - as, for example, when Amazon tells you about a new book you might well be interested in.

I suppose the difference here is that this beacon business is all a bit furtive and one worries that people with more sinister motives might start doing stuff - quite what I have yet to work out - to which end there are no doubt tech people, somewhere out there, busily developing markets for it all in the security world.

In the meantime, I don't think I shall lose too much sleep.

Reference 1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html.