The streets are watching. How billboards are spying on you

[Matthew]

The streets are watching. How billboards are spying on you

An email from Big Brother Watch highlighting billboard facial recognition.

https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-co...tching-You.pdf

Introduction
The internet is saturated with hyper-targeted advertising that draws on users’ browsing
habits, their interactions with the web and assumptions made about them by online
advertisers.

Now these personalised online ads are reaching out of our screens and following us
onto the streets, as profiling and predictive analytics are used to determine not just the
sponsored post in your Twitter feed, but what is shown on a digital billboard on your walk
to work. This is the new era of advertising surveillance.

Billboard advertising is becoming increasingly data-driven with high-tech tools being
used to make sure that screens show the right adverts at the right time of day. From facial
detection algorithms used to tailor displays to massive data gathering operations that
aggregate information collected from our phones with other sources to model exactly who
will pass by a billboard and when, the physical advertising space is becoming ever more
personalised and intrusive.

Shoshana Zuboff dubbed the buying and selling of information designed to allow
advertisers to predict who is most likely to buy a product the “behavioural futures market”
and argues in her landmark book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that the giant
companies dominating the internet exist almost exclusively to model our behaviour and
use these predictions to sell us things. Now, real world advertising is catching up.

Big Brother Watch’s investigation into surveillance in advertising has found that industrial
scale data gathering and specific targeting is not only the preserve of the online space.

Millions of phones send GPS data to advertising companies, while mobile phone networks
sell datasets based on surveillance of their customers. Advertising infrastructure
companies are pushing facial detection and vehicle scanning tools to allow brands to
target certain kinds of people while big data brokers are predicting people’s movements
just to show them an advert at the perfect moment.

Nods to privacy regulations and protections exist, but this industry functions solely to use
personal data as a tool to target us as individuals just to make more sales. Questionable
consents and data processes that are given little justification, bar claims of GDPR
compliance, abound in the ad tech industry.

The very essence of who we are has become the driving force for an industry that is no
longer satisfied with contextual advertising – rather, marketers want to know us better
than we know ourselves and shape our experiences in the virtual and real worlds to
influence our behaviour.

...