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September 22nd 2006 at 10:40 am in The Albert Heijn, some big groceries store-chain in the Netherlands, is going to start to spam its customers utilising Bluetooth technology. It is a test, and currently only active in one establishment.
According to this article (Dutch, of course), only people that have Bluetooth enabled when entering the shop will be targetted, and only after they have confirmed the verification message whether they want to receive the message. That’s the only good thing about it, although I can imagine a lot of people having the thing open for everyone and those will simply receive all the messages? (I don’t know exactly because I haven’t got a Bluetooth device.)
Anyway, now they not only profile you by tracking and tracing all the items you buy with their so-called ‘Bonus-card‘, but now they have a matching device to send messages to. Oh the term that is usually applied to this concept is ‘targetted ads‘ but in my humble point of view its simply ‘legalised spam‘.
A supermarket in my ‘hood also has this ‘customer-card’ scheme which basically is a profiling scheme. This year, big TV screens have been installed, showing advertisements for their products. At some point; when they got RFID stuff in their customer-card, I bet those screen will ‘target’ ads at yo’ ass. They say ‘effeciency‘ but I’m a still call it ‘spam‘ — the things are only in place to help sell more of their crap.
(Thing is those bastards probably bought all this fancy technology from the inflated prices since we got that damned Euro-currency. If I divide what I used to earn then, by the price of a loaf of bread, man, it’s depressing to see how little I could buy now, about half. Governments blame the economy, I blame the damned Euro. 
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