The Russian company Retail Instruments has developed a program that is able to analyze store visitors by the signal of their smartphones. A sensor installed in the store detects those on whose phone Wi-Fi is turned on, and receives a number of data useful for retail statistics by the MAC address.
In particular, the sensor determines the time spent in the store, calculates the ratio of visitors to the store to the number of passers-by, determines the percentage of returning customers and provides statistics on even more than 30 parameters. In this case, the program uses data that is not classified as personal information, so the use of software is legal. A key feature of the counter from Retail Instruments is that it can only count buyers with Wi-Fi enabled on the smartphone, the sensor simply does not “see” all the others. Meanwhile, the creators of the program say that the representativeness of the sample is quite high and amounts to 15-18% (and in places where there is free Wi-Fi, it reaches 40%), so the results are reliable.
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