Being well over 75, my mum is one of that select band who still reads a daily newspaper in its paper form rather than online. She even reads the 'style' items, which are often written by 20something interns, which means there's a gulf between the concepts and phrases they take for granted, and her comprehension of the same.

So at the end of every year – usually over Christmas lunch – I, as the family's resident zeitgeist barista, get asked to define a word or idea she has been reading about constantly but has struggled to understand. One year it was “chav”. Another year it was “bling”.

The one I was expecting last weekend, but didn't eventually get as it turns out, was “the Internet of Things”, or IoT as it's sometimes styled. Perhaps my zeitgeist antennae are now too finely attuned: perhaps it'll be 2016's buzz phrase, a conversation topic for next December's Christmas table.

Either way, IoT is quietly revolutionising our lives which means it will have a significant role to play in shaping our shopping habits. Maybe not in these January sales, but certainly in January sales to come. And if you think it's going to make the whole experience more enjoyable, think again.

In essence, IoT refers to physical objects which are made the traditional way – in a factory in a Chinese city you've never heard of – but which are laced with sensors and software feeding data somewhere else. To an app in your phone, say. It's what lets you turn the central heating on when you're still an hour from home. Sometimes the info goes to third parties: put chips into windscreen wipers and you can sell the harvested data to real-time weather forecasting services. Clever, no?

The Dandy Lab, a hipster clothes shop in (where else?) East London, is an enthusiastic early adopter of IoT technologies for use in the retail sector. Wade through all the Nathan Barley-esque nonsense from a “vertical solutions architect” about “fog computing” and “context-aware portals” and you eventually come the salient facts: the shop's IoT kit can measure footfall from smartphone signals, sort return customers from random walk-ins and use that data to feed images to display screens so that punters' shopping experiences are tailored to their already-established tastes. Sounds awful doesn't it?

My favourite bit of the kit, however, is what I call the “shoe cam”, a gizmo which gives shoppers a knee-down once-over and uses that data to draw yet more conclusions about their tastes.

Now I'm writing this at home wearing a pair of tartan supermarket pyjamas whose bottoms are tucked into white kilt socks pulled up to the knee. Completing the look, my feet are encased snugly in a pair of grey Uggs. What would the Dandy Lab “shoe cam” make of all that, I wonder? Post a message saying: “There's nothing for you here, old man. Please leave quietly without disturbing the other shoppers”? Flash up a 404 error code? Explode?

I don't think I want to find out, so I for one will be avoiding shops where IoT technologies are evidently in use. One day, that will probably mean all shops. It's bad enough having the human till jockeys giving me a quick sartorial audit: I certainly don't want a machine doing it too.