Tokyo Rail Billboards Scan Viewer's Age, Gender

eldavojohn writes "The AFP is reporting on digital billboards in Tokyo that scan for a viewer's age and gender to tailor the message to them. It's a Digital Signage Promotion Project that 11 railway companies are debuting. The head of the project said, 'The camera can distinguish a person's sex and approximate age, even if the person only walks by in front of the display, at least if he or she looks at the screen for a second.' Philip K. Dick's Minority Report draws closer every day."

Comments

OK, too far.

[BVis]

At what point do we turn to the marketing overlords and say "Fuck you, you don't have a right to know my age or gender, as much as you think you might". Advertising has gone too far already with being microtargeted, someone has to draw the line.

YOU DON'T HAVE AN INALIENABLE RIGHT TO MARKET TO ME. Make money by doing something useful, not leeching off those who do.

Re:OK, too far.

[phantomfive]

lol really? I don't understand your unexplained rage at being marketed to. Would it bother you if they instead paid a person to sit out there and write down the gender and approximate age of every person that walked past? Pretty much every person you see throughout the day has this information about you (and a lot more, for example, that you get upset a lot).

I mean, yeah, it's kind of annoying to get to a web page and there's advertising on it, but the ideal advertising is when you only tell people who are interested in a product about the product. That way you don't have to worry about people who aren't interested, or people who might become homicidal because of it, like you. This just goes one step closer to only giving people advertisement for things they might be interested in.

Really, don't kill anyone over this.

Re:OK, too far.

[commodore64_love]

>>>YOU DON'T HAVE AN INALIENABLE RIGHT TO MARKET TO ME

Yes actually I do. It's my mouth and if I want to stand on a street corner and market my "the world is ending" speech all day long, I can. If you don't like it, move to a different part of the public street or only frequent private areas (like malls) where I can not enter.

 

Re:OK, too far.

[phantomfive]

OK, I can accept that I may be wrong, that there may be some privacy issue that I'm not seeing. Not everything done with technology is a privacy problem, though. There is no personal information stored here. It's like the difference between putting a tracker on a car and a machine that counts cars going by. One is a privacy violation, and the other is laughable to get upset about.

I know it's good to worry about privacy issues, and slippery slopes and all that, but this isn't a slippery slope. We can draw a line between things that need a warrant (or permission) and things that don't. "Think of the privacy issues" is like the nerd equivalent of "think of the children," you can use it to manipulate geeks to oppose things, but I don't see this one as crossing the line.

In any case raging about it does nothing except make you look silly, and probably reduces your chances of actually doing something practical about it.

Re:OK, too far.

[GooberToo]

If I'm interested in a product, I don't need to be told about it. If I want to find it, I'll find it

My head just exploded.

In general terms, the point of most advertising is to either introduce an unknown or new product to the public or to inform the public of benefits of using said product. As such, if you don't know about a product, how would you know you don't need to be told about it? Which means, you know you don't know so you don't need to know, therefore not knowing means you know enough about it to not need to know. WTF?!

*Boom* There it went again.

Re:OK, too far.

[GooberToo]

Somehow this simply subject seems to go completely over your head.

How about, "black jeans". If you never knew they existed and no one ever told you they existed, its likely it would never occur to you to even search for, "black jeans". Obviously jeans in an all around bad example, but the point is, you insist you know you don't know and therefore since you don't know you know. The fact remains, its impossible to know everything you don't know; especially when you don't know what you don't know.

We all agree advertising can very much suck. But reality is, unless you live in the woods and off the land, advertising also serves an important social function. Well, at least to any consumer/commercial society.

*BANG*

Re:OK, too far.

[gstoddart]

You make a big deal out them knowing your gender and age, but any human being you walk past would know that immediately. Why does the fact that it's being done with technology make you uncomfortable, but for another human to know that is perfectly ok?

Easy, because a human can't automatically upload an image of your face to a database, correlate your movements with all of your credit card purchases, make inferences about your long-term buying patterns, and then sell that information to someone else who has no business with it in the first place.

The technology allows for far greater scale of privacy invasion, and provided an opportunity for data about you to persist in ways you couldn't even conceive of.

Think of it as Big Brother, but operated by commercial interests.

Re:OK, too far.

[cayenne8]

Ok, then why do they keep incessantly advertising product that everyone knows about?

Coca Cola? McDonald's?

It isn't like these aren't already known world wide. Sure, I guess new generations come out...but surely you don't need to advertise them THAT often, that is, if the main reason like you argue, is to inform people of products they might not know about?

Re:OK, too far.

[auLucifer]

Not at first but once he starts to franchise his world is ending speech he will be able to. Hell if the speech is so good perhaps a joint venture with one of the big fast food chains will be able to supply the extra workers to help promote it! "End of the world happy meal! Limited time only! *expires when the world ends"
Or better yet. Chances are one of the franchisees could be christs second coming and once he says the world is ending you'll have the attention of most of the world. He'll have people coming right upto him, giving him all of their details like age, gender, health concerns, bank details and all the details of their family members and he'll not have to employ a heartless billboard or trawl any social networks.

Re:OK, too far.

[phantomfive]

Says the man with 'censorship is obscene' in his sig.

Re:This can't end well...

[interkin3tic]

Automatic recognition, on a wide scale / network, of young females, in Japan?

Uh, no. It's not automatic recognition on an individual level beyond age and gender. It won't say "Hey! Yoshiko! You there! Buy some Pocari Sweat!" It might say "Hey! Big group of mostly 20 something guys heading to the business district! How about some Evangelion-themed pachinko after work!"

It's not going to be a wide scale network, at least I see nothing suggesting it's going to be networked. Which, getting back to the previous point, would be pointless anyway. "Hey! You might be one of the 10 million 15 year old males we saw in Osaka last week! Drink Coke Zero!"

The "looking at the billboard" is a clue. I think it's just going to try to measure which demographics are looking at which ads, so they can target them better. "This particular location near the line to Akihibara 'electric town' saw a whole lot of 20 to 30 year old males, so that's where the ad for the next Dragon Quest would be most effective. Meanwhile, the exit from the Keio line had mostly elderly people, so lets not pay as much for those locations."

Re:QUIT WRITING DYSTOPIC SCIENCE FICTION...

[smellsofbikes]

... you're giving them ideas!

The whole point of *good* science fiction is to issue a warning to the world about what will happen to us all if we don't act now to stop whatever issue the writer is writing about. Scifi that presents a good future is escapism. Scifi that extrapolates our current trends and demonstrates the catastrophe that will ensue, is great literature, and from the standpoint of its potential worth to our culture, it's probably the greatest literature we have.

Re:hmmm

[Idbar]

I happens that there may be many people in front of the billboard.

I'd assume that when the detector cannot discriminate, a general advertisement should come up.

I could come up with a basic list of what could be shown: Old man: viagra
Middle age man: sport cars
Young man: condoms
Old woman: Body lotion
Middle age woman: gym equipment or subscriptions
Young woman: tampons or female hygiene products
man (unable to discriminate age): cars
woman (unable to discriminate age): magazine subscriptions
young (unable to discriminate sex): video games/soda
middle aged (unable to discriminate sex): banking products
old (unable to discriminate sex): vacation spots
unable to discriminate age and sex: consumer electronics/cellphone plans


Now, group these categories and show something different every time.

Re:hmmm

[thepotoo]

OK, TFA has absolutely no details, but I think all it's doing is recording information about the demographic that looks at the billboard, thus allowing the billboard owner to say: "57% of the people looking at this billboard are male, 18-35 years old" and then pick an appropriate ad for the space.

The issue with this, of course, is that if you have a billboard showing some iteration of rule 34, a certain demographic is going to look, and you'll get the impression that only this demographic looks at ads, and then show more ads targeted to this demographic (lolcats) when in fact (hypothetically) there is a much larger entire demographic (say, 65+ women) walking by that doesn't stare because they don't care about lolcats. Maybe they just have a blank wall to get a sense of whose walking by before they show any ad? Or maybe this is just to get a sense of how many people are actually seeing the ad?

I don't know, this seems like a case of over-engineering, privacy issues aside ("operators have promised they will save no recorded images" yeah right).

Re:This can't end well...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some fine name dropping, Lou. Fine, fine name dropping. I can tell you're into seeming like you're into Japanese culture.