Stephanie Clifford (New York Times)
Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers—how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors—the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall, the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones. Customers weren’t so happy.