The article was published in 2012, but I think the the actual events were something around 10 years earlier. I had discussed that with my students when I was teaching. Biometric data has been pursued/used by stores for a few years already. Bluetooth is also used to track people in stores and doesn’t need to be from a phone. It is very easy to make use of the bits of data collected and connect them. There is an entire industry doing deanonymization.
There are a number of books, but these are the most relevant that come to mind.
- Kashmir Hill (author of the linked article on Target) wrote Your Face Belongs to Us which deals with facial recognition and includes a section dealing with biometric data being pursued to track customers/people.
- Byron Tau’s book Means of Control is, I think, the newest in this category and includes Bluetooth tracking.
- Privacy is Power by Carissa Veliz, not a favorite but very relevant as well.
- Shoshana Zuboff’s doorstop of a book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is older now but worth every word and is often referenced in later books.