Data Security

Wal-Mart yesterday warned consumers of a bogus phishing email purporting to come from the retailer. The fraudulent email looks like a confirmation of a purchase made on Walmart.com, but is actually an attempt to gather personal information from the recipients, the retailer said in a statement. "This email is not from Walmart.com, and it is important that recipients do not click on any links in the email or respond in any way," the company said. "We are investigating the source of the email and working with appropriate authorities."

Etsy breached some sellers' privacy with an email sent this week to buyers. The email was experimental in nature to test new features and went out to a limited number of buyers, though Etsy wouldn't reveal how many sellers were impacted. Etsy Spokesperson Sara Cohen wouldn't say whether the company would inform all sellers who were impacted.

Retailers are blessed with extensive data about their customers and their shopping behavior. This data comes in the forms of offline and online purchase data, extensive email databases, response data, loyalty card databases, direct mail response data, social media data, and website data.  Despite this wealth of information and most retailers' extensive history and expertise in offline modeling, I'm shocked to see that many continue to struggle with merging siloed information and leveraging it across the new digital landscape.

Don't like the price you're seeing on a coffee maker or a toothbrush? Try waiting five minutes. That lesson is starting to dawn on consumers as retailers embrace technologies that allow them to make rapid-fire price changes on a hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Consumers are accustomed to rapid price fluctuations in the online world, used by sophisticated e-commerce retailers like Amazon.com, but brick-and-mortar retailers are embracing technologies that crawl the web for product prices and make adjustments on the fly both online and in stores for things like consumer electronics, power tools and even consumer packaged goods.

Even in today's data-hungry analytics environment, collecting and keeping every tiny granule of retail data — down to the level of each individual transaction and web click — might seem like overkill. But Sears Holdings has discovered that data storage costs have gotten low enough, and analytical tools have grown powerful enough, that this approach to big data has shortened the time needed for analytics projects by 60 percent to 70 percent, while also improving promotion conversions, lowering inventory levels and boosting sales.

Police were in the process Friday morning of debriefing the hostages and putting together composite drawings of the suspects. In addition, they were scouring surveillance video from inside and outside the Nordstrom Rack, surrounding businesses and the mall to determine whether any additional suspects were involved. The 14 hostages held overnight at Nordstrom Rack in Westchester were all employees of the store, LAPD officials said Friday. At least three hostages were injured, in the incident that began at 11 p.m. 

Best Buy co-founder Richard Schulze will make a fully financed offer to purchase the electronics retailer by the end of the week, possibly on Friday, according to the Star Tribune. A formal proposal to the board of directors before the Sunday deadline is expected to be at least $5 billion to $6 billion. Schulze and his team secured agreements to finance the deal from bankers and private equity investors, which includes Cerberus, Leonard Greene & Partner and the Texas Pacific Group, according to the article, citing an anonymous source.

Benetton is among the few brands that have splurged on the $5,000 a head mannequins that spy on shoppers with facial recognition software. The implanted cameras aren't looking for shoplifters, however. They're logging gender, age and race. The technology, once used to identify criminals at airports, is now used in three European countries and right here in the US of A to help contour shopping experiences based on the creeper mannequins’ findings.

The currently pending Do-Not-Track federal legislation is being proposed to make it easier for consumers to block tracking cookies; however, it has not yet been passed by Congress. In the meantime, the efforts by privacy advocates are beginning to create more consumer awareness of existing web browser tools for deactivating cookies.

Barnes & Noble has revealed that customers shopping as recently as last month at 63 of its locations, including stores in California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, may have had their credit card information stolen. On Sept. 14, 7,000 PIN pads throughout the retailer's locations nationwide were disconnected due to signs of tampering on some of the units. It has been determined that one keypad in each of the 63 stores had been hacked.