Targeted advertising on billboards: how advertising on the Internet turned into real life
Now, billboards with facial recognition decide which ads to show you while you go to work.
Advertisers use the information obtained from targeted advertising on the Internet and use it to create billboards that show personalized ads to the people who view it. This conclusion was reached by British scientists in their report, created jointly with the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.
The report, titled “The Streets are Watching,” describes how companies use billboards with high-quality facial recognition cameras to analyze the world around them, and then use that data to show personalized ads to pedestrians.
While advertisers endorse the practice because of its effectiveness, the report argues that the massive collection of user data poses an inherent, high-risk privacy issue. The authors warn that such targeted advertising on billboards could potentially deprive people of the opportunity to pass through the crowd unnoticed.
The report claims that to create individual profiles, advertisers can analyze pedestrians based on their accurate GPS location, demographic data by sex and age, and behavioral data, such as how they interact with certain apps.
The report also reveals two billboard owners in the UK who are using facial scanning technology from the French company Quividi. This firm claims that its products can determine the gender, age (+- 5 years) of up to 100 faces in a crowd at the same time and the amount of time that passers-by look at the billboard screen. According to the report, Quividi can “see what you’re coming” and then adjust their ads at the right time.
The Big Brother Watch team said these profiling techniques have been used for years to display targeted ads online and on mobile phones. Now, advertisers are deciding what kind of ads people see while walking down the main street. Intrusive online advertising went beyond the screen and got into the real world.
With the advent of billboards with facial recognition, Big Brother Watch raises privacy concerns for ordinary pedestrians. Smartphone users can adjust certain privacy settings to reduce tracking, but this cannot be done with face-recognized billboards in public places.