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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."
Automatic recognition, on a wide scale / network, of young females, in Japan? Oh my...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Quick! Everyone put on Larry King masks so all the billboards turn into adult diaper ads!
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
...I doubt they get much accuracy in age, and probably a large number of "indeterminate" or false positives on gender...
If some electronic add calls me a chick, I'm punching its lights out!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The commercial eye-scanners were all Spielberg.
If you wanted to be really evil, you could program it to identify socially awkward teens and have it identify them as the opposite gender.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
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.
Qxe4
So this tech will not work against two types of foes:
Muslim women with only their eyes exposed
Those of us who will see these billboards everywhere in 30 years and start dressing lie ninjas in public.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Qxe4
... you're giving them ideas!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Since the system is being developed in Japan, we know that crossdressing guys will be identified as evil because of the Square-Enix rules.
As a 47-year-old married guy with two teen-agers who is having trouble paying his bills, we don't want to make you feel worse by showing you ads for products you can't afford, like new cars. We show those ads to Dave, next door. What you need is ... Pepto-Bismol, and maybe some antidepressants, right?
"Money problems? Did you know there are places in this world that will buy your children? Press "9" on your television remote for further details."
And this is different from signs with the same capability that have been in US Malls for a good while only in that they're actually actively acting on the info, whereas the US marketers, AFAIK, only so far use it to analyze who is viewing their ads and for how long. Next time you're out and about the mall, look for the small camera on top of the ad. They're out there/
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.
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.
Quick! Everyone put on Larry King masks so all the billboards turn into adult diaper ads!
No, everyone put on "interkin3tic" masks, so we can get all the billboards to turn into weird hentai ads!
Just, let's please come to a consensus, all one or the other, because if we half do Larry King and half do me, we're going to get wierd hentai ads featuring adult diapers. And there are some lines even I don't want to see crossed.
Methinks he dost protest too much...
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Maybe if it was 1880. The idea that "giving consumers information about a product makes them buy more of it" is easily the least effective and most simplistic type of marketing. This is sometimes combined with more advanced forms, but is often left out.
Modern marketing theory has its roots in the 1920s and Edward Bernays. At its core it is about associating a product with a person's desires at a subconscious level. It has long since gone much deeper and more manipulatively past this. Look up "Century of the Self" if you want a good account of what really went into forming modern marketing strategy.
Look at recent Corona ads or Dos Equis ads for examples of where this has gone these days. The ads have almost nothing to do with the beer they are trying to sell, and no information at all about the product. Yet it is still very effective advertising.
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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........