SecTrainer
05-31-2008, 10:22 PM
Apparently, they're now equipping billboards with cameras in order to study who looks at them and for how long. In other words, billboards that look back at you (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin). Some day, the billboard might analyze your gender, approximate age, and perhaps even your ethnicity and "present you with a customized message". Yippee. I'm old, your system tells you, so I would undoubtedly be interested in a special deal on Depends.
The developers claim they're not storing or distributing any personal data, and perhaps that's true - for the moment.
One problem with this technology, as with some others, is not "what it does or can do today", or "what we do with the information today", but "what it will be able to do tomorrow", and "what we will be tempted to do with the information tomorrow". Facial imaging tied to facial recognition tied to....
This is the biggest problem that exists with all surveillance and "information gathering" systems, namely the opportunity they create for the convergence of data gathered by disparate systems to create information super-databases that are much more powerful and intrusive collectively than the information gathered separately could ever be.
For instance, an ad agency placing a digital ad display for Budweiser outside a grocery store could arrange to merge their visual information about viewers with personal information about them that the store collects. Suddenly, the "anonymous" viewer who spent 30 seconds looking at an ad for Budweiser outside the store now has a name, an address and probably a credit card number. And, the store has his facial record, as well as some indication of his interest in Budweiser.
And this is a very weak example of the multiplying effects of information convergence. Put the information gathered by a bank together with information gathered by a gas station CCTV camera together with facial information gathered by a digital ad display together with travel information gathered by a travel agency with browsing information gathered by your ISP....well, you get the point I'm sure.
So, in the year 2010 or so, our Budweiser digital ad viewer suddenly notices that there seem to be a lot of commercials for Budweiser, Wells Fargo bank, Chevron and Caribbean cruises on his cable TV, and a lot of banner ads for these companies on the Web sites he visits, too. He has no idea how or why this "coincidence" might have happened.
Many who gather information protest that the information they gather is anonymous. The problem is, it is becoming too easy, by means of convergence, for "anonymous" information to be melded with information collected by someone else that does contain identifying information. And the monetization capability - read, the $$$ that I can get - for merging my data with yours is so great that it's a rare bird who would be able to resist the temptation. I might get $1 every time one of the 100,000 faces in my database is viewed by someone in your database. We're not talking $millions for superlarge databases with high levels of access...we're talking $billions, paid "view-by-view" by Coke, by Budweiser, by Hilton, by Chevron, by Travelocity, by....
Now, let's take this a step further and consider that information that can be collated in this way can also be legally "discovered" in a civil lawsuit and searched under court order by governmental agencies, and now the full extent of the problem begins to emerge. This is a very slippery slope, but it's much too late for society to recover from this slide, and the commercial interest in these super-databases is far too great to overcome.
The developers claim they're not storing or distributing any personal data, and perhaps that's true - for the moment.
One problem with this technology, as with some others, is not "what it does or can do today", or "what we do with the information today", but "what it will be able to do tomorrow", and "what we will be tempted to do with the information tomorrow". Facial imaging tied to facial recognition tied to....
This is the biggest problem that exists with all surveillance and "information gathering" systems, namely the opportunity they create for the convergence of data gathered by disparate systems to create information super-databases that are much more powerful and intrusive collectively than the information gathered separately could ever be.
For instance, an ad agency placing a digital ad display for Budweiser outside a grocery store could arrange to merge their visual information about viewers with personal information about them that the store collects. Suddenly, the "anonymous" viewer who spent 30 seconds looking at an ad for Budweiser outside the store now has a name, an address and probably a credit card number. And, the store has his facial record, as well as some indication of his interest in Budweiser.
And this is a very weak example of the multiplying effects of information convergence. Put the information gathered by a bank together with information gathered by a gas station CCTV camera together with facial information gathered by a digital ad display together with travel information gathered by a travel agency with browsing information gathered by your ISP....well, you get the point I'm sure.
So, in the year 2010 or so, our Budweiser digital ad viewer suddenly notices that there seem to be a lot of commercials for Budweiser, Wells Fargo bank, Chevron and Caribbean cruises on his cable TV, and a lot of banner ads for these companies on the Web sites he visits, too. He has no idea how or why this "coincidence" might have happened.
Many who gather information protest that the information they gather is anonymous. The problem is, it is becoming too easy, by means of convergence, for "anonymous" information to be melded with information collected by someone else that does contain identifying information. And the monetization capability - read, the $$$ that I can get - for merging my data with yours is so great that it's a rare bird who would be able to resist the temptation. I might get $1 every time one of the 100,000 faces in my database is viewed by someone in your database. We're not talking $millions for superlarge databases with high levels of access...we're talking $billions, paid "view-by-view" by Coke, by Budweiser, by Hilton, by Chevron, by Travelocity, by....
Now, let's take this a step further and consider that information that can be collated in this way can also be legally "discovered" in a civil lawsuit and searched under court order by governmental agencies, and now the full extent of the problem begins to emerge. This is a very slippery slope, but it's much too late for society to recover from this slide, and the commercial interest in these super-databases is far too great to overcome.