A local Dallas Fort Worth CBS Affiliate this week reported (via Consumerist) that Nordstrom has been testing technology from Euclid that allows them to track customer locations at 17 of the company's stores around the country using their cell phones. Nordstrom was hoping to use this data to track store foot traffic, but the public attention apparently made them nervous -- given the day after the CBS story aired, Nordstrom cancelled the plans. The company insisted to CBS in a follow up statement that the timing of the plan's cancellation was just a coincidence:

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“We’d been testing Euclid since September and have said all along this was a test for us. We had been discussing what made sense in terms of concluding the test; after 8 months we’d felt like we had learned a lot and determined that it was the right time to end it," said (Nordstrom spokesperson Tara Darrow) in an email.

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Nordstrom insisted that no personally identifiable information was obtained during the trial, though a study recently found that this data isn't as anonymous as companies like to pretend. Granted this isn't much of a "win" for privacy-conscious consumers, since malls have been tracking user location since at least 2011, and all wireless carriers track and sell your location data to everyone from marketers and governments to city planners and stadium owners. Still, it's nice that some users and news outlets discovered this is happening, even if it's several years after the fact.