> And Facebook has even been taking steps to influence offline sales, in order to bring traditional retailers into its orbit. In September, the social network introduced a tool that lets businesses with physical stores show ads to shoppers and their Lookalikes even if they visit the store but don’t buy anything.
"Facebook will also now know you visited a store based on a new feature that matches GPS, beacons, WiFi, radio signals, and cell towers with brick-and-mortar coordinates." [1] Basically harvesting data from your phone's sensors, where their app is installed.
And: "A new Facebook API, called the Offline Conversions API, works with a number of in-store sales systems from companies like Square and IBM to match their customer data with Facebook’s advertising data." [2]
(More science-fictiony: they could broadcast a local audio signal that fingerprints a particular location. Hmm, startup idea.)
That's terrible. I hope that removing all of Facebook's software from a phone and using cash prevents that. I hope you're joking about the audio signal.
Not quite used for in-store advertising, but Google's "Nearby Messages API" does use "near-ultrasound" audio signals to communicate with other devices: https://developers.google.com/nearby/messages/overview. I don't know if it would work at a larger scale, though (maybe you couldn't allow dogs in your store!).
Does anyone know how this works?