Sorry, but there’s a typo in this sign. It should say Lose your identity. After reading a NY Times article about a company who’s developing a billboard camera to record the gender of whoever looks at it, I’m creeped out. The company in question Quividi can say they don’t store the images captured by the camera, but if this isn’t a slippery slope towards that inevitable scenario, I don’t know what is.I can just see a brand person now, “Well, it’s great that we know gender, but wouldn’t it also be great to know more about them so we can, you know, target them with select offers from trusted third-party vendors! Like, the car they got into? Who they were walking with? The logo on their shopping bags? Forget what sites they visit after leaving our website, how cool would it be to see what place they went into after viewing the sign. This would be waaaaaaaay better than focus groups because it’s, you know, real-time.”
Yeah, that would totally be like, awesome brand dude, just awesome™. (And later, after you take pics of a guy with someone who’s not his wife, you can show the tape to trusted third-party divorce lawyers.)
This is invasion of privacy pure and simple. It’s one thing to count the number of hits a website gets, or how many people pass through a turnstile, but short of physical contact, taking someone’s picture without their consent is about as personal as it gets. If I can’t record someone and show their face without first getting permission for commercials and photo shoots, how is this even legal? Otherwise, I can just claim anything I shoot now is for ‘research.’ Until then, I’ll just have to start flipping the bird to every outdoor I see.
3 comments:
Great reaction, Bill. Seems the world of offline tracking is now almost upon us. A lot of people, including Microsoft, are working on taking multiple feeds of offline data such as your cell phone GPS location, your credit card purchases, even the cable TV shows being piped into your home, to build 360 degree profiles.
Photos or video from billboard seem invasive, but they are just the tip of the iceberg.
One point: We already live in this world in financial services. People have accepted that any whiff of your money is tracked by banks into detailed credit reports and histories. Anyone in finance can find out if you are reliable or a deadbeat, which bills you skip, and peg you with a "number" that determines whether you pay 1% interest, $10% interest, or get no loan at all. Miss a Toyota payment back in 2002? Do you spend more than 30% of your HHI on a mortgage? The banks already know, and they vary how they treat you because of it. This tracking/personalization is widely accepted, and we all seem cool with it ... but it's rather invasive.
Advertisers are building the same we-watch-you-everywhere model. The marketing feeds are coming together, this time with GPS location and a few cameras. So smile, buddy, especially if the line of site is outside and legal.
Perhaps it's just fair turnabout to all those consumers who buy rags with unwelcomed photos of Britney Spears.
Good Job! :)
great post
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