[catsncomputers]

its very similar to what a company called Locarise do in Japan. It's not identifying anyone, merely seeing buyer hotspots, queues, recording visitor numbers, etc. All very valuable to a mall and imo quite harmless to the user if they are not identified

[thatcat]

They could later choose to sell this data and the buyer could deanonymize it by merging it with other purchased databases.

[reaperducer]

There's no such thing as anonymous data.

The ad-tech industry wouldn't exist if there was.

[ebalit]

There are anonymous data that are interesting for advertising. The number of people passing by a location is anonymous in itself.

It seems however that in the case of the Canadian mall implementation (or more precisely their solution provider) they stored more than this number, losing the anonymous property of a system they sold as an "Anonymous Video Analytics".

In my opinion, something should be called anonymous if and only if you cannot go back from the stored data to a personally identifiable information.