TruMedia defends its advertising spyboards
Photo: Marshall Astor
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about TruMedia's spyboards, which recognize faces and track the number of people who look at the ads they display. The equipment is sensitive enough to determine gender, approximate age, and how long a passer-by looked at it. In a letter to the editor published today, TruMedia promises it will never share the stills or the data.
Our own privacy policy states that we will never engage in any video recording and that the data we collect is anonymous and will only be reported in the aggregate — and not individually identifiable.
Perhaps some of us don't want you recording us in public and collecting this information, either. Folks, all you need is a small, easily-removable, non-destructive sticker.
Billboards and Privacy [NYT]
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How about poisioning their database -- get lots of people to go out in masks to stare at the cameras, or possibly just to post portraits of famous figures around the neighborhood, moving them periodically to keep the system from concluding they're just another billboard...
So, what exactly is the problem? If you're in public, you can have your picture taken. Even if they were storing the video data, they're well within their rights.
Adonge has a point there, although not one i'm entierly happy with. This kind information is within there legal rights to collect, after all a computer taking in this information just from an image isnt much different from someone taking a crowed scene with a camera and tallying up the number of men/women in specific age groups.
I think it boils down to use rather than just collection, If I take a photo of someone on the street then there's not a lot I can do with it unless I take multiple photos of a person in harassing manner at which point it becomes an offence.
The difference is that this data is going to be fed into an analytics system of some kind which could be used to monitor peoples movements a-la Minority report (though using hollywood examples is always dangerous)
So we need to think about where this is going, do we sacrifice some of our free expression rights in order to protect ourselves or do we start talking about "intent" and wrapping this kind of issue with legislation?