Should Tracking Be Allowed for the Benefit of Businesses?

"Google+ Hangout: Are Retailers Watching Our Every Move?"
Published on September 21, 2012
By Christopher Matthews, Time 
http://business.time.com/2012/09/21/google-hangout-are-retailers-watching-our-every-move/

If one is involved in the internet, they know that somehow or another they are being tracked. Retailers and businesses track consumers down in order to find out how they can market us more. "Stores are using everything from the wi-fi signals in smart phones to facial-recognition technology to understand how shoppers are interacting with retail outlets" (Christopher Matthews, Time). The reason stores are doing all this is to see how they can compete in having better products that the consumers would most likely get from them. Christopher Matthews started a discussion with Pam Dixon and Laura Davis, two experts about tracking. Listening to what Laura Davis was saying about how stores track people, was pretty disturbing. They can track literally every single move a person does, every single place a person looks. Pam Dixon was talking about how having bluetooth or wi-fi on in a store gives the retailers their opportunity to track people down. Turning these off might help in not being tracked down. What the experts were saying that I agreed with was that if the businesses just track down enough to know the number of people in a store, that would be understandable. However, tracking only a number leads to tracking each individual and having access to personal identities. I do not think tracking should be allowed, because privacy is a human right that no one can overlook and should be protected no matter what the situation happens to be.