A few years back, Levis opened the new and improved Levis Store in San Francisco. Along with tailoring your jeans, the store would also remember your measurements. You could go into the store, walk up to a terminal, and via a DHTML interface, place an order to have new jeans made up on the spot, just for you. The system would let you choose between relaxed fit versus snug, black versus blue, strait leg versus tapered, etc. And you could bet that this info was stored for marketing purposes. I think this info was even available online for a while, so you could order more custom fit jeans. But the idea of storing info about customers for use in retail outlets never really caught on.

Now, the world of online/offline commerce is a little older and a little wiser, and a little greedier. CNN is running a very interesting article about the use of smart shopping carts and loyalty/discount card programs in grocery stores. Both of which are designed to collect information on, and in some cases make recommendations for, what individuals buy. Some of this info is collected anonymously, most of it not. This info is then used to determine how people shop, what they shop for, which promotions work and who the most loyal customers are. Much like online cookies, the potential to use and abuse of this information is huge. Is this information kept confidential, or is it sold to various marketing data collection groups? How complex are the customer profiles, do they know I’m a vegetarian? If I buy Tide, lighter fluid and a box of nails all in one visit to the store, are they going to call the cops? Or are they going to give me, and me alone, special discounts on oatmeal raisin cookies cause I buy them so much? Or how about reminding me when I haven’t bought toilet paper in a few months, so I don’t have to deal with the ugly and embarrassing consequences of completely running out? Should we fear or embrace this technology?

Marketers often use teenagers’ behavior on Facebook as anecdotal evidence that they do not mind handing over information. But 55 percent of respondents from 18 to 24 objected to tailored advertising.

The fact that there are people who are willing broadcast things like their location and current state of mind, but are not comfortable with tracked ads, leads me to believe that there is a large disconnect between what people say they are comfortable with and what they are actually comfortable with. That and companies like Amazon and Google have largely been built using user data to drive marketing and sales, and they’ve been very open about it. Amazon tracks users in all kinds of ways to give you recommendations and related products, and people like those features. G-mail reads your e-mail (reads your e-mail!!!) to serve you ads, and it’s the most successful web e-mail service. And none of this is new. Retailers have been using discount loyalty cards and coupons for decades to track what people buy.

One thing I’d like to know is do the people surveyed believe that they are being identified by name by online tracking? Online tracking (ideally) does aim to identify unique people, but does not identify people by name. So, the companies doing the tracking know that user 092389 likes the band The Cure, but they don’t know exactly who user 092389 is. It’s the difference between possible invasion of privacy, and group tracking and reporting. The next question I have is, is my above assumption correct, do the companies doing the tracking stick to ID’ing people anonymously, or are they really trying to determine a user’s name? If they are, then there is cause for concern.

As someone who works for a B2B company where a large percentage of our audience are still using IE6, I really hope this catches on. IE6 has become on the bane of the existence of both web developers and designers alike.

When Google released the Chrome Beta they positioned as more of a web app development platform than a browser, I wonder if that’s RockMelt’s plan as well. I could see room in the browser market for browsers that are for specific uses and end up being transparent to the end user.