Billboards shove us toward surveillance state

The lengths to which advertisers will go to get to us are ingenious. The War to Part Us From Our Money is being fought by some of the most clever, unscrupulous bastards not in politics.

It's odd how the tactics seem to mirror one another, that's damned sure. Big Brother has an economic side as well. That said, where is stuff like this going? The evolution of advertising is putting us on a road toward increasingly invasive, hostile and omnipresent advertising campaigns. I see a future of hard light logos eviscerating themselves in the air above us, the winner shaking broken shards of his foe from his corporate defined war form, then shifting to his advertising form. His advertising form, cuter by far then the razor lined puma, tells us that Coke is better then Pepsi in taste, not just combat.

From the New York Times:

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.