Here is a creepy story, it seems Wal-Mart might be watching you as you pass by different displays to guage their effectiveness.

In an apparent attempt to avoid the taboo “RFID” flavor of intrusion, Wal-Mart is hoping to sneak an IR system into its stores to gauge the effectiveness (and elicit more advertising dollars, of course) of its various promotions. Dubbed Prism, the arguably dodgy system was crafted by Coca-Cola, Kelloggs, Kroger, Procter & Gamble, Walgreens, and Disney in order to “track shoppers’ movements around the store” and correlate them with actual sales in order to judge display effectiveness.

So while you might think that you are just going about your shopping, corporate America is trying to analyze and target you with their advertisements in order to get you to buy their products. While this might be old news to people, I never thought that companies would go so far as to track my movement patterns through their stores. Anyone else want to go run randomly through their stores to throw off their data?

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