You walk into a record store (assuming there are any left) and a facial recognition system scans your face. It takes your picture and searches the Internet for an exact match.
The system finds your Facebook page and sees what bands you listed as favorites or ‘likes’ or friends. As you walk down the aisle for indie rock or hip hop or easy listening or whatever, a voice speaks to you from overhead.
“Hey, John Gomez, what’s going on? How about 20% off Radiohead’s new CD?” (Assuming Radiohead is still making music.)
Cool, huh? A custom shopping experience for everyone who comes into the store.
“Hi, Liz James. Did you like the CD you bought last month? We have a couple more bands similar to that one you might like. Would you like to hear our suggestions? We can give them to you for 25% off.”
Get the picture? Pretty awesome. And all automated.
The bad:
One of the employees at the record store dabbles a little in computer hacking. At night he likes to hack into the store’s system and search for information on customers. Specifically, he likes to search for information on the customers he’s written down credit card numbers for throughout the day.
With more searching on the Internet, he has a driver’s license number, an address, a phone number, a couple email addresses and even—the grand prize—a social security number. He has a complete identity to go along with the credit card number he wrote down earlier.
Scary, huh? About as scary as the good example was cool.
Stay tuned for Pt. 2…
