Technology
Track-by-Phone Vendor Nomi Misled Consumers, FTC Says
The Federal Trade Commission building in Washington on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
(PYMNTS) – Customer-tracking vendor Nomi Technologies failed to give in-store customers an adequate chance to opt out of being tracked through their smartphones, according to a settlement announced on Thursday (April 23) with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC charged that Nomi’s privacy policy said it would give consumers who didn’t want to be tracked a way to opt out online and in-store. Instead, for nine months in 2013, Nomi provided no way of opting out in-store and didn’t tell customers — or other people who were tracked because they were just passing near a store — that they were being tracked at all, the FTC said. (Nomi did offer the online opt-out option on its website.)
New York-based Nomi was acquired by retail analytics company Brickstream last year. But in 2013 it was a startup with $3 million in funding that promised brick-and-mortar retailers it could let them track customers in-store as accurately as on a website, using the Wi-Fi signals from each customer’s smartphone.
Nomi’s problem wasn’t the tracking, but the fact that it didn’t follow its own privacy policy. That made the opt-out promises false and misleading, according to the FTC.
