It’s a fact of life today – you are being tracked…
And not just online.
The government has permanent cameras up in most major cities, and at major transportation, entertainment and sporting venues around the country. There are cameras all over most office buildings and stores. There are smart cameras that take your picture at toll booths and major intersections. For the most part, your public life is well documented in stills and videos. These technologies have become a major tool of security and law enforcement.
But the uses for it don’t stop there…
Video/image analysis technology has progressed to the point where it is starting to become interesting to retailers as well. And this interest isn’t for detering shoplifting or petty theft.
Retailers want to use it to track and target consumers…
This space is called biometrics, and there is a lot happening here that should be making folks think.
For example, a company in Canada named Xuuk, Inc. have released a product called eyebox2 that is designed specifically to track customer eyeballs. Basically, it can detect if someone is looking in it’s direction from up to 10 meters away. When integrated into in-store displays, it allows vendors to see how many people look at specific ads or merchandise, how far away they are when they first see them, and how long they maintain eye contact with them.
This is the physical equivilant of counting click-thru’s…
Another company in the biometric space – Neven Vision – was purchased by Google less than a year ago. Neven Vision specializes in facial recognition – the ability to recognize a specific individual based on an image of their face. These types of systems can work well with simple photographs, as well as dynamic video streams. Google acquired them to explore identifying specific individuals in pictures on their photo sharing service, Picassa, so people could more easily search photo libraries for people they know.
This is still a work in progress for Google…
With the facial recognition technologies available today, people no longer need to be looking directly at a camera to make a good match. Systems today use multiple images from various angles to produce what is effectively a 3-D map of a face. They also supplement that approach with an analysis of specific skin details like scars, moles or other permanant cosmetic attributes. When these methods are combined, even people walking in crowds can be identified at a reasonably high level or accuracy.
It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that a company like Google that is so focused on the advertising space would see this type of analysis as a natural extension of their business. If they were to combine it with eye tracking technology like Xuuk provides, they could build a profile of what stores specific individuals visited, what items and ads they looked at, where they ate, etc. They would also be able to provide a bridge between online and offline tracking.
Each person would effectively become a walking, (hopefully non-deletable), ‘biometric cookie’ for themselves. They could be identified and tracked everywhere there was a camera.
And now days, that pretty much means everywhere…
This all reminds me of a scene from the movie ‘Minority Report’ where the main character John Anderton(Tom Cruise) walks into a GAP store and is immediately recognized through biometrics (in this case, a retnial scan):
While we aren’t there yet, we are probably much closer to having this capability than most people realize – at least at a basic level. And I feel that even the possibility of being personally tracked through boimetrics everywhere we go should be a concern to us as a society – especially when you consider just how far our current government is willing to snoop into what were traditionally private areas of our lives, and corporations try to target us with advertising.
If privacy isn’t dead already, this would certainly kill it…