User Acceptance of Footfall Analytics with Aggregated and Anonymized Mobile Phone Data

Monitoring and analyzing pedestrian traffic in and around retail stores has become an important tool for discovering underutilized operational and marketing opportunities of retail localities. Since a large proportion of pedestrians nowadays carry mobile phones, visual observation methods of the past could give way to cell-tower and WiFi based capture of passers-by, optionally augmented by aggregated or anonymized demographic data about them coming from their service providers. A major mobile phone operator recently announced the introduction of such a service in Germany, the U.K. and Brazil, but had to cancel its plans for Germany since the revelation caused nationwide privacy uproar.