During a recent visit to Walgreens, I saw a rather interesting tech upgrade to the plain old shopping cart.

Inside the shopping basket was a notice on a bright yellow background. “Attention shoppers! Our shopping carts will lock if taken beyond the parking lot perimeter. While distinctive yellow lines mark normal exits, the entire lot perimeter is protected.”

So being a total tech neeeerrrrd, I started taking looking at the shopping cart to figure out how it worked.

The wheels looked OK from inside the basket…

…but at the ground level, it was obvious that one wheel was completely different.

The front left wheel (the same as the warning illustrated) was encased, and not completely solid like the other three wheels. It also felt heavier to spin by hand, but I didn’t notice any difference in moving down the isles when I was pushing the cart.

Did I put enough eeeeerrrrd’s in the neeeeerrrrd description above?

Anyhow, the “Trojan wheel” had 10 phillips screws all along the perimeter and didn’t make any noise or give any resistance when I changed directions suddenly while driving the cart.

I’m guessing that this wheel is always listening to a signal that tells it it is “inside” the store grounds, and once that signal fades, a locking mechanism clamps down on the front left axle to bring the basket to a grinding halt. But I wonder if that means the wheels need occasional recharging or if the motion of the basket recharges the unit like our kinetic motion can charge modern watches?

Another option would be if there is a actual line-of-sight signal fence along the store perimeter, where if the basket crosses the signal line (which would have to be from ground level to about a foot high), the wheel gets the OK to seize up.

It’s an interesting piece of tech that I see being useful to stop some thieves from getting away with $75-$400 pieces of store inventory, but I wonder if these stores thought of how easy this security would be to bypass. If I was a bad guy, all I would do is pop the nut and bolt off the “trojan wheel” and put on a “normal wheel” from another basket! Done!

With the easy-to-scan timeline now in place for every user, and the packaging of the terabytes of freely-provided user data to companies eager to advertise to a wired audience, Facebook is having a grand old time right now.

I think there’s one little problem, though. Once corporations realize they’re just leasing the data on Facebook and not owning the data on Facebook, things will go downhill pretty quickly.

Let me give an example…

Let’s say there’s two competitor pizza chains, Road Runner Pizza and Coyote Pizza. Both pizza chains get to pull relevant user information from Facebook if they choose to advertise with them. Each company will get user’s ages, demographics, locations, weekend activities… everything freely posted by individuals to update their friends and to help corporate America make better targeted ads. Each pizza company will get to post their customized ads in the targeted demographic’s timelines and harvest any trending information that will help their pizza business succeed.

Here’s the boulder-in-the-face moment… let’s say a little ways down the road, Coyote Pizza drops their Facebook advertising for some reason or other.

Coyote Pizza’s data, all of their research, all of their demographic targeting, all of their strategies, all of their previous advertising positions, all of their activities done through and by Facebook, are STILL the property of Facebook.

Data which Facebook can now sell to Roadrunner Pizza since Coyote Pizza is no longer in the game.

Facebook made their billions by selling data. Not by selling physical products. Not by setting up free social meeting places. DATA. That’s their plan, plain and simple. Sell the data to whoever will pay for it. Why should Facebook treat corporate data any different from an individual’s data?

This boulder-in-the-face moment may take a little time to hit companies who are eagerly jumping on the Facebook bandwagon right now with giant $970 million dollar signs in their eyes, but when it does, I expect a serious “you tricked us!” backlash against Facebook.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Facebook will respect corporate information better than they do individual information and keep a balanced campaign for competing companies despite their overlapping demographic interests. Or maybe Facebook will happily take a blank check in trade for a few year’s of a company’s targeted strategies and tactics that another advertiser is interested in.

It should be interesting either way.