The Technology that Senses Your Feelings?

By: Aaditya Jain | 9910029327 | The 15A Chronicles'Desk

Recollect the last time you passed by a Starbucks, got tempted by an exotic coffee aroma, and instantly received a message on your phone from Starbucks offering an attractive coupon. It’s like your phone can sense your feelings too.

Well, it is not exactly so. Brands deploy a technology, called Beacon, at their retail premises. It is a small device, that sends out radio signals at regular intervals, which are caught by your phone when it is in the vicinity of that retail outlet. These signals are encrypted IDs, which instruct your phone to perform a certain task, such as to send you a promotional SMS. The phone searches for that ID in the cloud services installed on your phone. The cloud service holds the description of that task, and Voila! Your phone performs the task as soon as it comes to know about it.

Apple was the pioneer in introducing this technology as iBeacon in 2013, which was limited to Apple’s devices. In 2015, Google followed its footsteps, and introduced its Beacon for androids as Eddystone. In 2016, Google succeeded in making the technology app-free, wherein it was no longer mandatory to have a brand’s app installed to get its notifications from Beacons.

Based on the mode of communication, the Beacon technology is divided into 3 types, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wifi, and Hybrid. The most common of these is BLE. This is because a Bluetooth signal consumes extremely low battery power, approximately 3% of what a wifi signal would in your phone. However, on the downside, the former can only send a small amount of information as part of its signal, at a time. This disadvantage is offset by the info (task description) stored in the cloud services as mentioned above. This is why, Beacon technology is set to become a 25-billion-dollar industry by 2024, with majority of it predicted to be ruled by the BLEs.

One of its applications is Geo-fencing, wherein brands send you notifications whenever you are in close proximity to their outlets, and when your phone’s Bluetooth is ON. These notifications trigger an urge in the consumers to shop for the product, with the brand selling that product being nearby.

Now, say that based on your Google search for shoes, Facebook shows you an ad of Nike. The next time you enter Nike’s showroom, beacons installed there would help in capturing your phone’s ID, and would provide that ID to Facebook. Facebook, as a result, would charge Nike a certain fee since it is because of Nike’s ad that was shown to you on Facebook that you had the urge to visit Nike’s showroom (at least this is how Facebook would interpret it to earn revenue).

As beneficial as it was for brands like Nike, who were analysing the effectiveness of their ads (with your visit to their showroom being a KPI), it had a downside too. Brands like Nike had to pay a fee for your visit to their showroom, irrespective of whether you have made a purchase. Thanks to the latest Online-to-Offline tools that brands have to pay the fees to advertising platforms like Facebook only when you have seen their ad, and made a purchase in their offline retail outlets. It is these tools that provide advertising platforms with info on who all have seen a particular brand’s ad, visited its showroom (within a specific time period of seeing that ad), and made a purchase.

Beacon technology has various other uses too, which are yet to be implemented on large scale, such as helping the customers with an outlet’s map on their phones while they are searching for an item in its premises, or recording the In and Out time of a customer in a public transport so that he or she can be charged accordingly (BIBO, or Be-In Be-Out ticketing).

However, this technology raises some serious privacy concerns as well. For instance, the battery and search engine in your phone is being used by the retail outlets to trigger a push notification to you, without your prior conscious consent. Similarly, it records your phone’s ID to attribute the ads to the offline conversions, recording your movement while you are on a naïve shopping spree. One good thing - securing your privacy is in your own hands. The next time you want to restrain your offline exposure to the brands, just turn off your phone’s Bluetooth.