Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Even more intriguing is that there are no current laws regulating any of this. “Indeed, the law would likely look at all of the information as public—that is, information that someone has exposed to the public. Most laws deal with what information retailers are permitted to collect and what they can do with it, but they don’t deal with information like video. Indeed, with the exception of peeping tom laws, very few laws restrict the collection of images of shoppers. In fact, while the law might prohibit you from audio recording a conversation, it would likely not prohibit you from collecting a video of that conversation and hiring lip readers, which is what several British tabloids did at the Royal Wedding,” Rasch said.

Clearly, this raises a wide range of ethical and moral issues. But those are typically not IT matters. IT needs to be able to use technology to serve the chain, while others set limits. Hopefully, such limits will be voluntarily set soon. But until then, the amount of data-crunching and data-retention could soon rise rather sharply. As for me, the next time I shop, I’m wearing a Halloween mask. It will be one of those rare times when wearing a gorilla mask will be less scary than not wearing one.