Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

If consumers don’t know they are being tracked, it’s hard for them to get upset about it.

But Biggar still puts wording into her firm’s contracts asking that signs—which are overwhelmingly ignored—be posted, “very similar to the signage that goes up around CCTV.” She adds that stores have “no regulatory requirements” to do so, at least in the countries where her firm has deployed these mobile trackers.

And Biggar herself is hesitant to push the privacy issues too far, which is why she says personalized data is something she wants to avoid right now.

“We won’t say that a customer went from Starbucks to Macy’s. We don’t do it at the level of the individual. We’re very careful that it’s all at the aggregated level,” she said, adding that the malls she tracks will house “30,000 (customers per day) on average. We’re not interested in what one individual is doing. Individual-level data is icky.”

The comparison has been made between E-Commerce and M-Commerce, suggesting that even the most aggressive mobile data efforts are merely replicating the type of track-every-move-you-make that retail Web sites have done for many years. But there’s a very key difference: Someone chooses to go to a Web site for shopping. The phone is with them almost always, and the emotional connection is very different.

And there are always the demographic issues with privacy debates. Certain customer groups, especially teens and young adults, don’t seem worried at all about privacy concerns—their whole lives are already on Facebook. Others are much more cautious as a group, though marketers have been able to loosen them up over time, especially when data is used to make truly helpful functionality. (Think about how quickly the extremely small backlash against Amazon’s initial “people who bought that also bought this” efforts evaporated.)

But some chains have customer bases that span the demographic range, and that makes privacy decisions even more frustrating. At least a store focusing solely on teens or on the elderly or pregnant women or middle-aged athletes has an advantage in tailoring a privacy plan.

One major factor in how far a chain can—and should—go with mobile privacy is a dirty word in IT circles: discipline. That means texting messages, but doing so rarely and only when it’s truly a helpful message. It means knowing the geolocation capabilities you have and choosing either to not use them or to again use them only when the value to the customer is very high. That is very difficult to do and even harder to enforce on others.

Banning geolocation marketing is straightforward, but telling those marketers, “Here’s your commission plan, so go out and sell. But don’t be greedy and don’t push things too far.” With sales and marketing teams, commissions and bonuses speak loudly and disciplinary cautions are faint whispers. They know they’ll be fired if their revenue boost is insufficient, and they are likely to think that over-aggressive efforts will generate little more than a mild lecture.

The advantages of the information from various mobile efforts is huge, and we’d suggest that such data should not be left on the table. But the price for using that data will be disciplined control. If you can deliver and maintain that, the treasures of mobile data are yours and will come without much of a privacy penalty.