Billboards are being rolled out as surveillance vehicles.
Giant advertising billboards in London are recognizing human faces, interacting with human viewers (by changing the billboard content dependent on crowd responses), playing the surveillance footage back on a subsidiary screen, and sending messages to everyone in the vicinity not only via a subscription service but also SMS (which means: harvesting phone numbers alongside facial records). This variety of data about individuals collected without their consent can be used to identify them, to profile them as consumers, and to sell to any other entity (such as state agencies).
A recent story in the advertising industry's promotional organ, Ad Week, engaged in a roll-out of a new phase of the technology. In a brilliant PR coup, it was associated with a campaign to end violence against women. Thus a worthy campaign to address a very urgent and important social problem is exploited to sweeten the introduction of new corporate-owned surveillance technology and of new technological intrusions upon the rights of individuals.
There is little questioning the PR effectiveness of exploiting worthy causes to advance agendas of surveillance, profit and control. The initial result, as seen in a thread started on the story here on DU, was to divide people between those critical of the technology and those celebrating it because, in this case, it is being used to communicate a good message.
Here is the story, in Ad Week - note the unintentional implications of the sub-head. (The facial recog tech is being used to advertise, in this case. But of course we'll be hearing and we have heard how blanket surveillance will end crime, etc.)
Presented for an open discussion of all angles:
The Bruised Woman on This Billboard Heals Faster as More Passersby Look at Her. Facial recognition technology used to fight domestic violence
Here's an interesting use of facial recognition technology on billboards—to do something a little more inspiring than target you with the right products.
To coincide with International Women's Day this Sunday, London agency WCRS teamed up with Women's Aid and Ocean Outdoor to create some remarkable digital billboards about domestic violence. They use facial recognition to recognize when people are paying attention to the image of a bruised woman. As more people look at the ad, her bruises and cuts heal faster, communicating the benefit of not turning a blind eye to the problem.
The campaign premieres today at Canary Wharf, but it's actually already won an Interactive Award in Ocean's annual Art of Outdoor competition 2014. The video below is the case study made for those awards—with a different image, as you can see.
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/bruised-woman-billboard-heals-faster-more-passersby-look-her-163297
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what about your average cartel or private organisation that will have access to this data? which they surely will as they seem to have all the right contacts and network. That's the danger in allowing shit like this to proceed.
