Satellites Spy On Black Friday Shoppers

MojoKid writes "Those satellites in space don't just take spy pictures. On this Black Friday 2010, they actually took pictures of you, and your rush to Black Friday shopping deals. The research is being done to see what consumer demand this year means for retail stocks. The trend, so far, has been favorable. The companies involved in this are Remote Sensing Metrics and Digital Globe. Remote Sensing Metrics is a Chicago-based consulting firm that analyzes the satellite imagery. In turn, it purchases those images from Colorado-based company Digital Globe, which operates its own satellites."

Comments

One more reason

[Roland Piquepaille]

to stay away from the mindless consumerism that defines today's society.

My immediate family and I don't buy presents for any of the "holiday seasons". We offer ourselves things of no merchant value, such as poems, good time and love.

Whenever I go to town, I see people moving from shop to shop like drones, trying hard to figure out what they're going to buy next. We used to be like that, but we aren't anymore. We use money to live (food, basic transportation, reasonable housing) and our hands and heads for entertainment.

Re:One more reason

[Roland Piquepaille]

It's not the number of pixels that represents my car, or the danger (or lack thereof) for my liberties, it's the fact that those who want to sell us things treat us like cattle: our consuming habits are under intense scrutiny all of the time, and we are fed a form of brainwashing called "advertising" as a result of the marketing studies. And the worst is, it works: people consume, consume and consume all the time, and start consuming even more when certain dates come (like Black Friday).

I chose to stop consuming whenever possible, to not be a cattle.

To everyone under 30

[ldconfig]

I and us older folks messed up. I am very sorry you may never know what freedom really is. ld

Re:To everyone under 30

[jordan314]

I get a creepy feeling from this too. I've always favored military intelligence over war, and I supported the largest US spy satellite launch last week. But I was hoping our satellite technology wouldn't be flagrantly used to spy on our own citizens, especially for things as mundane as holiday shopping.

Re:To everyone under 30

[Anonymous Coward]

These images are collected by privately owned satellites, not the National Reconnaissance Office.

Re:To everyone under 30

[ffreeloader]

You are now so used to being spied on that you can't even comprehend what the world was like without it.

It was a much friendlier and relaxed place to live. Nobody had the right to sift through your life just to see what they could sell you and the government wasn't into monitoring every move you made and jailing you for the least offense. That was a society that had much more freedom.

I can remember when getting caught lighting up your tires wasn't an automatic reckless driving ticket and a several hundred dollar fine as well as a large increase in your insurance rates. Cops were much more human and forgiving for they remembered what it was like to be young and dumb and weren't out to disrupt your life for your first mistake. Most of them, as long as you didn't try to lie to them, would let you go with a warning even if they caught you making a pretty serious mistake. I've been let walk after burning rubber for half a city block and reaching close to 80mp in a 25mph zone right in front of sheriff's deputy I didn't see. He asked me what happened and I explained it to him: I was showing for a couple of very good looking young women and that it was a first for me to do that in town as my hotrodding and racing was done out of town. My honesty got me a warning instead of a ticket and some time in jail. Try that today and see what happens to you.

You had the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them without being severely punished. If you didn't learn, well, that was your problem and you could expect to have the book thrown at you the second time. During high school most of us used to carry pocket knives and a lot of us had guns in the trunks of our cars because we liked to go plinking after school. I remember pranks such as wiring the urinal drain in the faculty men's bathroom to a Model T coil not getting anyone kicked out of school, and intentional small explosions in chemistry class going unpunished. I also knew a guy who blew a foot deep hole in the football field with a home made pipe bomb who got nothing more than a 2 day suspension. He wasn't hauled off to jail and prosecuted for terrorism. In fact the issue never was reported to the police and this was done inside city limits.

Today's young people don't know what liberty is as we live in a society in which we are watched 24/7 and our liberties are fast disappearing. Not much individual freedom is left even when compared to eras such as the 60's and 70's, let alone the 1800's, but those of you who didn't live in those decades, and aren't students of American history, will never understand what has been lost. It's a paradigm you can't grasp because you've never experienced it.

Re:To everyone under 30

[ffreeloader]

"I've been let walk after burning rubber for half a city block and reaching close to 80mp in a 25mph zone right in front of sheriff's deputy I didn't see. He asked me what happened and I explained it to him: I was showing for a couple of very good looking young women and that it was a first for me to do that in town as my hotrodding and racing was done out of town. My honesty got me a warning instead of a ticket and some time in jail."

So you're whining that you can't drive wrecklessly down a street and possibly kill people. You're the reason why we can't have nice things.

Sorry, but that's the dumbest response I've seen in a while. How you managed to take that from my post is beyond me.

Government wasn't out to punish every infraction. They were out to teach if they thought you were capable of learning. They were human and recognized that they themselves made mistakes. They wouldn't let you get by with making the same mistakes multiple times, but a one-time infraction wasn't enough to always severely punish you.

Funny how back then it was much easier to get ahead, in spite of how you claim I'm the reason you can't have nice things. Where you drew that logical fallacy from is beyond me. It's some of the worst logic I've ever seen. Funny how you think humanity in a less intrusive government led to a bad economy. The reality is just the opposite. Big brother watching you and wanting to control every aspect of your life is the reason our country is going broke.

Re:To everyone under 30

[farnsworth]

So you're whining that you can't drive wrecklessly down a street and possibly kill people. You're the reason why we can't have nice things.

The reason we can't have nice things is not because people are human and make mistakes and do dumb things. The reason we can't have nice things is because recently the US has turned into a police state and a nanny state. Kids aren't allowed to walk to the park, zero-tolerance/three-strikes for utterly minor "crimes", and being treated like a criminal for wanting to travel around the country are all new things that have come to be over the last few decades. To pretty much any average US citizen (Helen Lovejoys aside) who is paying attention, this is an obvious and blatant turn for the worse.

People being human is not preventing you from having nice things. The current environment that is dehumanizing everybody indiscriminately is.

Yeah, You, Specifically

[Greyfox]

Since 1 pixel is 1/2 meter, this is approximately what you look like from space: ---> .

Digital Globe has a flikr feed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalglobe-imagery/

Re:Yeah, You, Specifically

[masmullin]

Oh man. That shot makes me want to play sim city

And people said I was weird

[proverbialcow]

They mocked me for staying at home, making aluminum foil hats and slathering my naked body with turkey gravy, but who's laughing now?!?

Re:no surprise

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I am moderately surprised that the fairly low-resolution data you would get from a visual surveillance satellite(ie. you can tell how full the parking lot is on Black Friday. How many people are there to buy el-cheapo crap to satisfy their Christmas obligations without going further into debt, and how many are there to pick up toys just because they can? Can you tell the difference between my 'Insignia' brand bottom-of-the-barrel-but-good-enough-to-watch-football-with-my-browskies LCD TV and a top of the line cinemaphile disposable-income-eater of similar size just by the box, from space?), even with sophisticated machine vision algorithms or more analysts than the National Reconnaissance Office, would be competitive with consumer metrics available from other sources.

I'm guessing that most Black Friday purchases are not made with cash and the ones that are are probably comparatively small and could be estimated just by putting a few flunkies near a statistically relevant sample of checkout lines. This would mean that any of the major credit/debit card guys should have a much better, and much more machine readable, trace on consumer spending. Retailers, of course, many of whom are publically traded and nearing the end of their fiscal year, obviously know what they sold; and I'm guessing that the guys in the shipping sector know reasonably well how much stuff had to be shlepped from the pacific rim to refill Wally World after the event.

Pictures from space have been a given for years now; they just seem like a sloppy source of data compared to all the others that already exist...