[privacy] Billboards That Look Back

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?_r=2
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?_r=2&hp=&;
oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin>
&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
 
May 31, 2008

Billboards That Look Back 

By STEPHANIE
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/stephanie_clif
ford/index.html?inline=nyt-per> CLIFFORD

In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure
everything - how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see
it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in
television and print. 

Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic
of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from
foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the
people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were
the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem.
They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about
passers-by - their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the
billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. 

Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing
actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The
cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in
front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height
and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person's gender
and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they
say that they can and will soon. 

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person
standing in front of it - to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white
woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

"Everything we do is completely anonymous," said Paolo Prandoni, the founder
and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in
Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi
and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short
videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.

Over Memorial
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/memorial_day
/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> Day weekend, a Quividi camera was
installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan
that was playing a trailer for "The Andromeda Strain," a mini-series on the
cable channel A&E.

"I didn't see that at all, to be honest," said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old
lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. "That's
disturbing. I would say it's arguably an invasion of one's privacy."

Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring
billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the
placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in
London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower
Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative. 

Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and
office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are
meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard
technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over
issues of public acceptance. 

"I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it's very
likely you'd be under surveillance, but out here on the street?" Mr. Cocks
asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the
camera and its purpose.

Quividi's technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/mcdonalds_corporation
/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 's restaurants in Singapore, but it has just
come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia
commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor
football team. Both Quividi-equipped boards were installed by Motomedia, a
London-based company that converts retail and street space into
advertisements. 

"I think a big part of why it's accepted is that people don't know about
it," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a civil liberties group.

"You could make them conspicuous," he said of video cameras. "But nobody
really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it
may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it."

And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like
Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological
addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their
cameras.

...

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