Malls Track Shoppers by Cellphone Signal

Slouching towards that mall in Minority Report:

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones. The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around. The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

Well they can’t track you until you make a purchase, then if you are able to sync that up with purchase history from a credit card database then whenever you enter the mall they know exactly who you are. Or if you can access the credit cards records, figure out their cellphone provider and then somehow convince/pay-off the provider to give the cellphone number, then you don’t even have to worry about the first part. And if the company doing this links all the systems in all the malls doing this together then they can track you from on location to the next. But of course, this invasion of privacy being done for the sake of commerce and inside a private enterprise could never ever be shoehorned into a tracking database used by the CIA or DHS.