Oh yeah. Buy a brightly-colored box of your favorite 'fluffifier' from El Grocerio and bring it home, and you're never the wiser that as soon as you put El Box-o in El Cart-o you're being monitored. Sure, it's just in Brasil right now - but you really think it won't be a-comin' here ... ? With THIS intrusive government ... ? Please ... be real ... it's something they won't be able to pass up.

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[urlhttp://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=145183[

Is Your Detergent Stalking You?

Brazil's Omo Uses GPS to Follow Consumers Home With Prizes

Posted by Laurel Wentz on 07.29.10 @ 12:23 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Unilever's Omo detergent is adding an unusual ingredient to its two-pound detergent box in Brazil: a GPS device that allows its promotions agency Bullet to track shoppers and follow them to their front doors.

Starting next week, consumers who buy one of the GPS-implanted detergent boxes will be surprised at home, given a pocket video camera as a prize and invited to bring their families to enjoy a day of Unilever-sponsored outdoor fun. The promotion, called Try Something New With Omo, is in keeping with the brand's international "Dirt is Good" positioning that encourages parents to let their kids have a good time even if they get dirty.

Omo accounts for half of Brazil's detergent sales and is already found in 80% of homes there, so Unilever's goal is more to draw attention to a new stain-fighting version of Omo and get it talked about rather than looking for a big increase in sales.

That made the idea of doing a promotion where the prize finds the consumer, rather than the consumer having to look for the prize -- and maybe not bothering -- appealing.

Fernando Figueiredo, Bullet's president, said the GPS device is activated when a shopper removes the detergent carton from the supermarket shelf. Fifty Omo boxes implanted with GPS devices have been scattered around Brazil, and Mr. Figueiredo has teams in 35 Brazilian cities ready to leap into action when a box is activated. The nearest team can reach the shopper's home "within hours or days," and if they're really close by, "they may get to your house as soon as you do," he said.

Once there, the teams have portable equipment that lets them go floor by floor in apartment buildings until they find the correct unit, he said.

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Since any technology that CAN be misused WILL be misused, reasonable people should be starting to squirm at the prospect of how this one will be misused. Be afraid - be very afraid.

Walmart's doing the same thing, only with more than detegent. It was on the news last week. It was bad enough when "Big Brother" was watching, now "Big Business" is too.


Fortunately for me, GPS can't seem to find my house. My friends try to use it and they keep getting an "off course" message. The bonus of living where they have to correct for longitude.

Combine this with RFID technology - which will enable the on-screen ads in WalMart and other stores to target YOU individually based on what's in your cart when you walk past - and you have an increasingly more-intrusive government and decreasingly less privacy as a result. I can't see 'The UN' passing up the opportunity to use technology like this ...