________________________________________________________________________________ Wired News Levi's Brave New World perspective by James Glave 3:00 a.m. 16.Aug.99.PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Big Brother wore khakis. Either that, or he'll be watching you buy yours at the new flagship Levi's Store, opening here Tuesday. At the lavish, frenetic, 24,000-square-foot, four-story complex, you are invited to deliver the most intimate details about you and your body in exchange for a dazzling entertainment experience and a perfect pair of jeans. The corporate take is slightly different, of course. "It's the intersection of technology and the best a brand has to offer," said Gary Magnus, content and development director for Levi's Global Retailing. The store of the future is aimed at teenagers who have grown up plugged into big-screen video, electronic art, digital audio, and high-speed Net connections. It is also a digital nerve center wired with more than 40 miles of cable, hundreds of speakers, and video routers, all pumping video and MP3. Customers can take a dip in a hot tub for true shrink-to-fit jeans, then stand in a human-size blow dryer while watching experimental films. Store visitors can also spy on other customers with remote operated videocam "periscopes" that tilt, pan, and zoom. They peer into tourist nexus Union Square across the street, but not into the fitting rooms. The store is engineered for fun. It's also orchestrated to learn as much as possible about its customers, right down to their very fingertips and bust sizes. The resulting profiles are uploaded at the end of each business day to a Levi's corporate data warehouse. Once there, data mining programs get to work, creating personalized direct mail campaigns. "We use biometrics so we can track people," Magnus said. "If [customers] don't want to participate they don't have to. It is a fun thing. We ask for your approval every step of the way." Indeed, before soliciting fingerprints or personal data, customers step up to a kiosk where they read the company's privacy policy on a computer screen. The long statement scrolls across a terminal screen at annoying typewriter speed. "I'm not gonna wait for this. I'll just hit 'I Agree.'" The result: A store that learns through sensory seduction. "It's collaborative filtering," said Gregory Ercolino, of Ercolino Productions, who handled the store's technical design and integration. Of course, it's all optional. Fingerprint identification is not required for visitors to enjoy anything in the store. Customers can delete their record at any time, and no processed data is shared or sold to any third party. The firm will only will use the information for its own marketing programs. That makes the data precious. "[The data] is a gold mine, yes," said Siobhan O'Hara, the company's customization director. This Levi's store represents the first large-scale voluntary collection of biometric marketing data in the country, if not the world. What's unsettling to privacy advocates, however, is the fingerprinting. Demographic data can be fudged on a Web page, but a fingerprint -- an irrevocable, permanent part of our human identity -- is forever. "There is a broader issue here, where many people don't fully understand the long-rage consequences of giving intensely personal data, like detailed body measurements, to a third party," said Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy in Technology. However, Levi's contends that young people were very keen on personalization and customization. For example, in-store kiosks welcome customers by name when they log in. The system even learns about a customer's musical tastes based on his choices at CD listening stations, including what tracks he switches off, and after how long. Two floors up, customers are invited to partly disrobe and step into the Levi's Original Spin -- a private booth that scans their body in three dimensions to suggest an appropriate fit of jeans. The dimensions are added to the customer's profile. Levis takes great pains to assure customers that the information is confidential. But Davidson pointed out that, if subpoenaed by law enforcement or another government agency, Levi's would be forced to turn over the biometric data. "Personally, I find it frightening that there is a market-driven model that leads us to massive and highly personal data collection linked to unshakable biometric data," Davidson said. A nonprofit group, Privacy International, sees the Levi's store as the realization of a Huxleyan nightmare. "This is the perfect way of softening up the population -- make people believe the forfeiture of their identity is glamorous and beneficial," said the group's executive director, Simon Davies. "But in 20 years' time, when people are routinely handing over their fingerprints, you will discover a generation that totally loses its capacity for anonymity -- and that is the germination of an authoritarian state." The executive director of a biometrics industry association said that most consumers are very gung-ho on fingerprints and iris scans. "The consumer acceptance of biometrics has been very solid," said Rick Norton, executive director of the International Biometric Industry Association. "There has not been a lot of resistance from customers." After all, who can resist a perfect-fitting pair of jeans? http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/21268.html ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org