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

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

waiting for it to call you a female and you are a male...

Re:hmmm

[Rutefoot]

You have no idea how potentially evil these signs can be. The thing is, age is very tough to identify with certainty with this sort of software (gender is really easy). If you want to know someone's age you first have to know something else about them....Their race. Now it's possible that they're only designing these things to measure people of Japanese descent, but if they're not, I'm willing to bet you that they also check for race to calculate age. The technology exists. I know, I've seen it in action. It works about 95% of the time for gender and they're getting better (I'm part of the 5% that it thinks is the wrong gender...sigh). There would be obvious issues with checking for race so if it does its most likely only using it for calculating age and not being stored, but the ability is most certainly there.

Re:The technology is already in use in the US

[Kizeh]

Reference link from two years ago: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/10/digital-billboa.html

Re:OK, too far.

[Haffner]

Wrong. It is possible to hurt yourself driving your car. The new GM forcefield prevents that from happening, under any situation. You didn't know it existed, but now that you do, I'm gonna bet you need it. This is not harmful.