Targeted billboard ads are a privacy nightmare

Advertisers take insights from targeted digital advertising and apply them to create physical billboards capable of delivering tailored advertising tailored to the types of people who see them. If this concept sounds eerily familiar, that’s because it’s exactly the kind of physically-aligned advertising vision that Tom Cruise encounters when walking through a mall in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 hit sci-fi hit. The Minority Report.

These targeted billboard ads, which have been around for a few years but are growing in popularity, are the subject of a new one report from the UK supported the civil rights group Big Brother Watch. The report, aptly titled “The Streets are Watching,” offers an in-depth look at how a handful of companies are using billboards with facial recognition to analyze the world around them and then use that data to deliver personalized ads to pedestrians to show. Although advertisers prefer this practice for its efficiency, the report argues that the bulk collection of user data poses an inherent privacy issue with high risks. The authors specifically warn of normalization Billboard ads threaten to potentially do away with the idea of ​​walking through a crowd anonymously.

“We’ve discovered new ways of tracking the movements and behaviors of millions of people to target us with ads on the street, resulting in some of the most intrusive advertising surveillance we’ve seen in the UK,” Jake Hurfurt, Big Brother Das, Watch’s head of research and investigations said in a statement.

The report claims advertisers can analyze pedestrians based on their precise GPS location, gender and age demographics, and behavioral data – how they interact with specific apps – to create tailored advertiser profiles. Although sophisticated targeted advertising on mobile phones has become the de facto standard of modern life, advertisers want to apply the same framework to physical billboards.

“These invasive profiling techniques have been used for years to deliver targeted advertising across the web and mobile,” said Big Brother Watch in a press release. “Now they decide what advertisements people see when they walk down the main street. The internet’s intrusive advertising has left the screen and entered the real world.”

The report goes deep into a handful of companies that create digital billboards using high-quality cameras that can recognize human faces. Some of these companies, the report says, are using facial recognition software to determine user demographics and even emotional details as users view content. In other cases, facial recognition may be used to determine whether or not a viewer is actively viewing a particular advertisement.

According to Big Brother Watch, Billboard facial recognition technology has been used in advertising campaigns in recent years emoticons Film, an anti-suicide charity, a Royal Navy recruitment campaign and for an organization which, among other things, raises awareness of prostate cancer. Other billboards in busy pedestrian zones reportedly change their advertising based on the perceived emotional state and gender composition of the crowd passing by. Most people don’t know they’ve ever been scanned.

“Going through the world feeling like cameras aren’t just recording video, but analyzing you as a person to shape your reality is an uncomfortable concept,” the report said. “This data is collected not only to find out if an advertising campaign has been successful, but to change how people experience reality without their express consent, all in an attempt to generate more sales.”

However, this type of face scanning tools more accurate than a few years ago are far from perfect, especially outdoors highly controlled test environments. countless studies have shown that these inaccuracies are amplified for non-white people. These inaccuracies in demographic profiling, the report says, can potentially reinforce stereotypes and lead to awkward, awkward encounters when a system serves an ad based on a false profile.

ALFI, one of the companies highlighted in the report, reportedly sells advertisers a “plug-and-play” computer vision tool that uses an algorithm to analyze “small facial features and perceptual details that lead potential customers to a good deal.” make candidates for a specific product”. According to the report, the company’s product claims to be compatible with many major digital billboards in the market. Last year the company allegedly provided Uber and Lyft drivers with around 10,000 face-recognition-enabled tablets to show personalized ads to riders. This incursion into transportation services drew criticism from activists and prominent lawmakers such as the Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, the wrote letters to Uber and Lyft, who raise privacy concerns.

ALFI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

The report goes on to highlight two prominent British billboard owners, Ocean Outdoor and Clear Channel, both of whom are reportedly using face scanning technology from a French company called Quividi. This company claims its products can detect gender, age within five years, up to 100 faces in a crowd at a time, and the time someone spends looking at a billboard screen. Quividi, the report says, can “see you coming” and then adjust its ads at just the right time.

In an email sent to Gizmodo a Quividi speaker took problem with the reports characterization of the company as a surveillance company and said it has always acted responsibly.

“We do not say, like many of our competitors, that we do not process any personal data and are therefore not covered by the GDPR,” said the spokesman. “The vast majority of data protection authorities around the world consider that the processing of an image containing an individual’s face is processing of personal data. As such, we fall under the GDPR [The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation] (and GDPR-like legislation).”

The Quividi spokesman went on to say that its technology could not identify individuals “neither in absolute numbers (complete identity) nor in terms of repeated exposure.” The company said the distinction means its technology should be described as “face recognition” rather than “face recognition.”

Big Brother Watch highlights fundamental questions surrounding “blanket consent,” which was once relegated primarily to digital ecosystems. Now, with the advent of digital billboards, the same concerns increasingly apply to pedestrians simply trying to find their way home or around town. While smartphone users could theoretically adjust certain privacy settings to reduce their surveillance footprint, the same isn’t necessarily true for pedestrians in public spaces.

“No meaningful consent can be given to any of these data processes as a person is often in the field of view of the cameras connected to the billboards or tablets before being alertedo Processing and have the opportunity to walk away,” the report said.

“This data is collected not only to find out if an advertising campaign has been successful, but to change how people experience reality without their explicit consent, all in an attempt to generate more sales.”