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Technology

Tesco To Scan Customers For Market Data

By square1
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Tesco To Scan Customers For Market Data

Tesco is to roll out eyeball-scanning technology to target adverts at customers. The supermarket giant will install screens that scan your eyes in its petrol stations.

Then while you queue for the till, the screen will show adverts it hopes will appeal to you based on your age and gender.

The screens -- called OptimEyes -- are made by Lord Sugar's Amscreen company. They'll find their way into all 450 of Tesco's petrol stations, Amscreen said in a press release, and could be used by other British supermarkets too.

It works by using inbuilt cameras in a TV-style screen above the till that identify whether a customer is male or female, estimate their age and judge how long they look at the ad.

The "real time" data is fed back to advertisers to give them a better idea of the effectiveness of their campaigns and enable them to tailor ads to certain times of the day.

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Privacy campaigners have voiced their concern at the news, saying that the explosion in personal data collection was threatening to spiral out of control.

Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch said camera technology was already available that matches scans of people's faces when they walk into a shop with their pictures on Facebook to tailor special offers to their "likes" on the social media website.

He told The Daily Telegraph: "People would never accept a degree of surveillance for law enforcement purposes, but these systems are solely designed to watch us for collecting marketing data.

Tesco was one of the first to track shopping habits with Clubcard, the loyaly card scheme launched in 1995.

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