Did you know that it is apparently legal and totally accepted for billboards in public places to do face tracking and recognition? Oh, no worries, they don't look you up on social networking sites and display something more to your tastes. Yet. They only use the face tracking to measure how long you are "engaged" and what gender, age, and ethnic group you are.
That's not scary at all.
They claim that no images are recorded and "no uniquely identifiable data are extracted". We all know how well large anonymized datasets have worked out in the past, so I'm sure it's totally fine like the advertisers say.
Advertising leads some technological curves, by its nature. They want to penetrate the most minds, and not in an obvious way; they want you to think that you thought you wanted that object, a desire that arose inside you. "If you're watching it, it's for you." They want to improve their tools, so that we don't (or even can't) notice them at work, re-architecting our inner desires.
The advertising corporations are watching you from public places. If I sat across from that "active billboard" in the subway and wrote down a list of who made eye contact with me and what "demographics" they fit in, I would seem like a psychopath. But then, nobody ever said advertisers weren't psychpathic...
No comments:
Post a Comment