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Real Life Ads Are Taking Scary Inspiration From Social Media (medium.com)
Advertisements in the real world are becoming more technologically sophisticated, integrating facial recognition, location data, artificial intelligence, and other powerful tools that are more commonly associated with your mobile phone. Welcome to the new age of digital marketing. From a report: During this year's Fashion Week in New York, a digital billboard ad for New Balance used A.I. technology to detect and highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits. A billboard advertisement for the Chevy Malibu recently targeted drivers on Interstate 88 in Chicago by identifying the brand of vehicle they were driving, then serving ads touting its own features in comparison. And Bidooh, a Manchester-based startup that admits it was inspired by Minority Report, is using facial recognition to serve ads through its billboards in the U.K. and other parts of Europe as well as South Korea. According to its website, Bidooh allows advertisers to target people based on criteria like age, gender, ethnicity, hair color, clothing color, height, body shape, perceived emotion, and the presence of glasses, sunglasses, beards, or mustaches.
We've been on the path here since at least a decade ago when the New York Times reported that some digital billboards were equipped with small cameras that could analyze a pedestrian's facial features to serve targeted ads based on gender and approximate age. Things have progressed as you'd expect: In 2016, another Times report described how Clear Channel Outdoor Americas had partnered with companies including AT&T to track people via their mobile phones. The ads could determine the gender and average age of people passing different billboards and determine whether they visited a store after seeing an ad.
We've been on the path here since at least a decade ago when the New York Times reported that some digital billboards were equipped with small cameras that could analyze a pedestrian's facial features to serve targeted ads based on gender and approximate age. Things have progressed as you'd expect: In 2016, another Times report described how Clear Channel Outdoor Americas had partnered with companies including AT&T to track people via their mobile phones. The ads could determine the gender and average age of people passing different billboards and determine whether they visited a store after seeing an ad.
Any other way you can think of to block this?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Kill all capitalists
if you don't want your brain pumped full of advertisements just don't walk into the advertising zones.
Now if you'll excuse me it's time for a smoke and a shot of popsi. Ah, the circle of consumption...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Self-driving cars and augmented reality should help quite a bit with ads and light pollution.
Would the GDPR actually help with most of those? If the billboard isn't sending anything back, but is instead simply processing your appearance locally and then acting locally on that information, is there any actual collection of data, so far as the GDPR is concerned? What about if the sensor that scans you is a black box that only outputs booleans corresponding to your traits (Beard: Yes. Long hair: No. Sunglasses: Yes.) and that even that data only ever stays on-device and never leaves to go to anyone's database? If those are considered a form of data collection that requires disclosure and consent, then how is taking any picture in public legal?
Honest questions. I'm not in the EU and and don't do business there, so I don't know the ins-and-outs of the GDPR, but it seemed to me, based on my limited understanding, that none of these were necessarily running afoul of the GDPR.
If you don't like advertisements which track you, than fight back: just make horribly disgusted facial expressions every time you look at an ad! It's a totally brilliant tactic, because if enough people follow this advice, these horribly unethical and creepy companies will eventually just give up and stop advertising altogether!
....... Oh, and no, your mommy's scold about your face "sticking that way" is absolutely not true, I promise! The ugly expressions might eventually become a habit, and those expressions might cause permanent frown wrinkles over the course of time, which could ultimately make you look like a genuinely bitter old codger in your later years in life, thus entirely ruining the effect on those rare occasions when you actually try to smile... but trust me: that's totally not the same thing.
/s
if you don't want your brain pumped full of advertisements just don't walk into the advertising zones. Now if you'll excuse me it's time for a smoke and a shot of popsi. Ah, the circle of consumption...
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree."
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Advertisers. Marketing. Sales.
detect and highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits
If the 'highlighting' included displaying a photo or video of the person wearing that outfit, wouldn't that be unauthorized for-profit use of that person's image?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Just wait until someone tricks it into continually serving racist propaganda. If I've learned anything from the internet, this won't last.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I block them all. No exceptions.
Corporatism != Free Market
To me, ads are still those times i go get a sandwich, soda or something.
" highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits"
I just went to the corner to get some beer, I thought the pajamas were good enough for that distance.
Probably the same kind of people who read H.G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon" as kids and then landed men on the moon.
Biometric data can only be processed with explicit permission from the subject. It would have to be opt-in.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Google will make it "voluntary" in such a way that you have no other option.
And they will get away with it because everyone thinks they are great.n Whilst at the same time their users are jailed in China.
Corporatism != Free Market
So, I did a little sleuthing around to follow up on this. This writeup walks through several topics in more detail, but the most relevant thing on that page is this quote from EU regulations, which elaborates specifically on the processing of photos:
The processing of photographs should not systematically be considered to be processing of special categories of personal data as they are covered by the definition of biometric data only when processed through a specific technical means allowing the unique identification or authentication of a natural person.
I.e. Only when the processing of an image results in data that can be used to uniquely identify the individual is it considered sensitive data. Similarly, the official site would seem to indicate the same, since it says that biometric data is considered sensitive when it's "processed solely to identify a human being".
A photo, obviously, could be used to do so in theory, but if the processing doesn't actually do so and they aren't passing it along to any other systems that might do so, then they wouldn't seem to be collecting "sensitive data". And if they aren't collecting sensitive data, they only need to meet a lower bar for lawful processing (e.g. only a legitimate interest would be necessary, rather than user consent, from what I understand).
Also worth noting, even if it had been classified as sensitive data, explicit consent is NOT the only way to lawfully process it. There are four other ways to do so as well.
we need to put a stop to all those sci-fi writers, clearly they have good intentions, but people reading the stuff all think those are great ideas we need to have in our lives and go out and invent a working model of it.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
" highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits"
Real, actual Fashion-Police!