User Acceptance of Footfall Analytics with Aggregated and Anonymized Mobile Phone Data

Abstract

Monitoring and analyzing pedestrian traffic in and around retail stores has become an important tool for discovering underutilized operational and marketing opportunities of retail localities. Since a large proportion of pedestrians nowadays carry mobile phones, visual observation methods of the past could give way to cell-tower and WiFi based capture of passers-by, optionally augmented by aggregated or anonymized demographic data about them coming from their service providers. A major mobile phone operator recently announced the introduction of such a service in Germany, the U.K. and Brazil, but had to cancel its plans for Germany since the revelation caused nationwide privacy uproar.

We conducted an exploratory interview study to gauge whether and under what conditions German consumers would accept if their mobile phone providers disclosed their personal data to retail stores they walk by, in aggregated and anonymized individual form. Virtually all respondents wanted their data to remain private at an extent that goes considerably beyond the protections afforded by current privacy laws. Nearly everyone however also indicated an interest in financial incentives in return for their consent to the transfer of their data, and many of them at seemingly very reasonable terms.