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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."
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
>>>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.
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."
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.
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.