If you've ever been to an Apple retail store, you know just what an oasis it can be: a bubble of retail calm where you, as a Mac user, can feel perfectly at ease. You're among friends. You can walk up to total strangers and start talking, because there's a decent chance that they're Mac nerds just like you are-- and even if they're not, at the very least you probably won't get Maced. Anyone who's been spit on by fascistic Best Buy staff for daring to wear a "Think different" t-shirt within the confines of that baffling warehouse of cut-rate consumer electronics can really appreciate the spa-like experience of hanging out at an Apple store and purging retail toxins with a healthy dose of Macitude. C'mon, the places even have their own bathrooms, for Pete's sake-- tell us that's not classy.

Believe us, then, when we tell you that we're loath to do anything that might disturb that sense of retail sanctuary you feel whenever you enter one of Apple's stores, but something has come to our attention that has our paranoia meters pegged at 11, and it would be grossly negligent of us not to report it here. (Not that we have a problem with gross negligence in and of itself, mind you, but we really can't afford another insurance rate hike.) Faithful viewer N Gray passed along a Wired article about that guy from Berkeley, California who flew all the way to Japan just to be first in line for the Apple Store Ginza's grand opening, and it's a good read about a Mac fan one or two twists more warped than the rest of us fanatics. The thing is, it also reveals something about the Apple retail stores that set our teeth on edge: apparently Big Brother Is Watching You.

Reportedly Apple's retail locations use something called "ShopperTrak" to "count the number of customers who enter the store, and to document their behavior once inside"; ShopperTrak is a "sophisticated video-monitoring system" which invisibly counts "the number of people passing the store, the percentage who enter, and the percentage of those who make a purchase." So now you know how Apple can periodically release those figures about the number of visitors to its stores and how many actually bought something. (There's no word, however, on how Apple knows that half of the customers who buy Macs in its stores are Wintel switchers, but we assume that the ShopperTrak system simply assumes that anyone with a haunted and beaten look in his eyes is crossing over from the Windows world.)

So there you have it: every single time you've been in an Apple store-- or, apparently, even passed by one-- you've been watched and "documented." Okay, so maybe it's Big Steve instead of Big Brother, and perhaps the covert collection of sales and customer traffic data doesn't quite rank as far up there on the moral outrage scale as 24-hour surveillance by an ironfisted totalitarian government with a penchant for sticking rats on your face, but it still makes us uneasy. Sure, we're all taped by security cameras in pretty much every store we visit these days, but nobody actually sees those tapes unless something happens (or the staff needs something to laugh at when they get drunk after hours). With ShopperTrak, though, you haven't just been mindlessly taped-- you've been watched and analyzed by some sort of HAL 9000-type computer that you just know is recording your strengths and weaknesses for that day when the machines finally make their move and take over.

Will that keep us from visiting the stores? Heck no, but we might keep ducking behind counters a lot and twitching uncontrollably. The good news is we pretty much do that already, so fundamentally nothing much has changed. If you see the camera, though, smile and wave; we bet that automated sales tracking systems get bored pretty easily.