And some poked fun at the spooky timing of the solicitation. Not everyone seemed too fazed by the practice, however, chalking it up to life in the Internet age. “The long-term solution means we need comprehensive privacy policy.” “The larger point here is the privacy protections in the US are still far behind our technology in our current business practices,” he said. Rotenburg said companies need to be “very careful” in deciding how to use the information customers provide, “precisely because there’s a sense that you can’t cross the creepy line without losing people or having people fire up a tweetstorm.” It was not clear whether they had made prior purchases from the site. “This happened to yesterday!!!! I told them to never ever call me again and remove my number from their call list as well!!!” they wrote on Twitter.ĭumas and the other Twitter respondents who received calls from Wayfair did not respond to a request for comment. I told them to remove my phone number from their list AND I cancelled that back ordered side table!!”Īnother person was similarly distressed. “They asked if I was a business and would I be buying anything from Wayfair for that business,” they wrote. One person who responded to Dumas’s tweet said they canceled their order after receiving a similar call Thursday. “I know you’re watching me, but that’s too many eyes on me.”īut these digital bread crumbs don’t seem to unnerve people as much as getting a call from a customer service rep does. Cheney-Lippold found that the number of trackers on Wayfair’s site far outpaced its e-commerce competitors: Amazon had 24 trackers running on its site on his first visit Overstock had 27 and Macy’s had just five. Most of the trackers were created internally by the company, but Wayfair also allowed Pinterest, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google Ads, and Facebook to gather data from the site. Using the uBlock Origin adblocking tool, Cheney-Lippold found that Wayfair used 103 different trackers to pull information about users, which could include IP addresses, browsers, and computer operating systems, he said. Wayfair’s app also sends daily emoji-laden alerts encouraging users to purchase the items they’ve been browsing. It’s the reason why so many ads follow you if you’ve been ogling a particular handbag online, or why you now get an e-mail from an e-commerce site reminding you that you put something into your digital shopping cart but didn’t complete a purchase. Companies can gather information about who you are using cookies, scripts, and tracking pixels, and then share that data across other websites, he said. Today, online tools embedded in websites and browsers help companies track a shopper’s path to purchase, and they can also provide insight into their intentions, said John Cheney-Lippold, a University of Michigan associate professor who studies Internet privacy. Rotenburg said companies have been collecting and collating data on customers for decades, using “third party enhancement firms” to obtain information such as a home phone number in order to fill in the gaps on a customer profile. “This is a stark reminder that companies collect far more personal information about us than many of us know,” he said. And it’s a line that not every company would choose to cross. The decision to move from monitoring keystrokes on a shopping site to calling someone about a sale is a tricky one for retailers, said Marc Rotenburg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She said that there is a 48-hour lag time between someone browsing on the site and receiving a call, and that shoppers provided their phone number to the company in advance of their being contacted. “Many customers find this helpful especially when shopping categories that include mattresses, flooring, plumbing, upholstery and other high consideration products where specialized expertise is particularly helpful,” she wrote. That team “follows up on previous orders and past site activity that indicates strong interest in a particular product category.”įrechette said the calls were not based on real-time browsing and noted that customers get an e-mail from Wayfair offering assistance before anyone places a call. “To best serve our customers and help them find what they are looking for, Wayfair has a team of specialists that follows up by phone with customers who have already made a purchase,” Frechette wrote via e-mail.
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