Target Targets Its Own Customers

A Target employee who turned whistleblower fired up some customers this week by posting a picture on TikTok that seemed to indicate that Target has tracking devices on its shopping carts.

The employee, known as Elijah P on TikTok, shared a video showing where the technology is located on store shopping carts. Small sensor tags equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios are attached to Target shopping carts and hand baskets. When paired with the ceiling grid, these tags communicate with smart LED lighting fixtures from Acuity Brands, which also contain embedded BLE radios. This system has been deployed in nearly half of Target's stores.

The system tracks the cart or basket's physical path to help the store analyze customer shopping habits and patterns. This helps the store identify its busiest areas and dead zones. With that knowledge, the store can place expensive or impulse items where people stop and shop most. It also allows them to see if new displays or signs are catching the shopper’s attention. 

Collection can occur in stores and also through Target's website, mobile app, digital advertisements, and emails. Customers have the option to limit certain types of location sharing by adjusting settings on their phones or within the Target app.

However, disabling phone-based geolocation does not prevent information from being collected through in-store cart tracking systems.

Although tracking may seem logical for the store, excessive monitoring can make customers feel exploited and surveilled, and it can manipulate them into making unnecessary purchases.

Non-consensual monitoring does not sit well with some individuals who have expressed concerns about it.

One wrote, “Yet another reason to not shop at Target,” while another stated, “This is an invasion of privacy!”

One unique comparison came from another customer who likened the additional eye to the sci-fi series Black Mirror, set in a future dystopia where modern technology is integrated into society.

“It’s giving Black Mirror. Unacceptable Target WTAF.” 

What Target is ignoring is that this has a distinct 1984 feel. People don’t want to be constantly watched or to be told what is best for them. Not everything that is good for business is good for society. 

If Target does this, then others have already indulged, and it has not been exposed, or they will in the future. Soon every store will be doing something similar, and personal privacy will shrink again. 

We need guardrails on personal surveillance and tracking. How we shop and which aisles we like to cruise seems like a good place to start, even if we're told it’s for our own convenience.