The Billboards See All
“Private eyes, they’re watching you. They see your every move.” ~ Daryl Hall & John Oates
Are outdoor and public display advertising the new big brother? Companies are now analyzing faces and using personal data from devices to tailor advertising in real time. Big Brother UK released a report, “The Streets Are Watching” detailing how advertisers are gathering data and aggregating information collected from face-detection software and our smartphones in a new area of ‘advertising surveillance’.
How it’s done: Advertising infrastructure companies are selling facial detection, vehicle scanning, and other tools that allow brands to target consumers by predicting their movement and showing them advertisements at the right time and place.
Clear Channel
Clear Channel has nearly 3,000 digital billboards across the UK which come with HD facial recognition cameras as a standard configuration. Despite outcry, the company continues to promote facial detection as a capability for clients.
Quividi
The company used gender and emotion recognition to promote the Emoji movie in 2017. Big Brother UK reports the software scanned the faces of nearly everyone who walked by the billboard. The data was used to overlay the scanned faces to a live feed that matched the gender and emotional state to an emoji processed by the algorithm.
Alfi
The American company provides a plug-and-play system that uses machine learning to analyze who is looking at a digital billboard and then serve them relevant ads. The company claims to offer brands the capability to deploy micro-targeting of advertisements, and only pay when the relevant audience views the ad. The company’s software can recognize race and ethnicity, opening up a host of legal and ethical concerns.
The report also highlights that Alfi’s technology is already in use on face-detecting tablets used in many taxi cabs operated by ValueCars in Belfast, Ireland.
The big deal: Mass face scanning in the name of marketing is just creepy, not to mention the legal, ethical, and privacy issues that come along with it. That, and the loss of anonymity that seems to be part and parcel to this new era of artificial intelligence.