Hey, I recognize you!

[surge]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...technology-is-everywhere-it-may-not-be-legal/

Being anonymous in public might be a thing of the past. Facial recognition technology is already being deployed to let brick-and-mortar stores scan the face of every shopper, identify returning customers and offer them individualized pricing — or find “pre-identified shoplifters” and “known litigious individuals.” Microsoft has patented a billboard that identifies you as you walk by and serves ads personalized to your purchase history. An app called NameTag claims it can identify people on the street just by looking at them through Google Glass.


Privacy advocates and representatives from companies like Facebook and Google are meeting in Washington on Thursday to try to set rules for how companies should use this powerful technology. They may be forgetting that a good deal of it could already be illegal.
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I can see the benefits to retailers in terms of identifying shoplifters and people with a history of suing, but this part bothers me: Microsoft has patented a billboard that identifies you as you walk by and serves ads personalized to your purchase history.

I'm not sure I want to walk down the street and have a billboard advertising to everyone else what I have recently bought. Talk about a thief's dream! "Hey, that guy has a new laptop... let's follow him home!".

 

[Debi]

OMG!!!! NO! Hey, my purchases are my own! Sheez!

 

[Naked Apple]

http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/snap-pictures-women-street-sell-beer/

Snap Pictures of Women on the Street, Sell Beer
.
A camera flash goes off in a woman’s face. She smiles, laughs and watches a beer ad on the bus stop billboard she had been passing. Men and underage girls are told to keep walking by the man in the digital billboard on the bus stop in Germany. It’s Astra Bierre’s ad targeting women via facial recognition in order to acquire new drinkers.
“Astra, one of Germany’s best-known beer brands,” says a man explaining the campaign in a video on The Drum, “has the same problem as every other beer. Women don’t particularly like it. We wanted to change that. So we took Astra’s primary advertising medium, the illuminated billboard, and reinvented it digitally and developed the first one of its kind in the world to speak only to women.”

So Germany, known for its beer, has fewer female ale fans than Astra would like. To acquire customers, the beer brand created 70 commercials for different situations, all meant to target women and to discourage men and children from watching. “There’s nothing here for men,” one of the 70 ads tells a human the facial recognition technology decided was male. “Beer’s for 16-and-overs” says “The Girl Detection Billboard” to two teen-age … girls. (The drinking age in the area where Astra housed the billboard — outside “Zum Silbersack” pub, a dive bar in Hamburg — is 16 and older.)