Since its publication in The New York Times two weeks ago, an article titled "Billboards That Look Back" caused uproar in the media. It described the high-tech billboards/digital signage advertisements created by TruMedia Technologies that look at the faces of passers-by to determine how many looked at the ads and for how long. The billboards quickly became a tornado for both conspiracy theorists and moderators of civil liberties, who portrayed it as another step toward an Orwellian surveillance society. Attempting to suppress the tornado of negative P.R. TruMedia wrote a letter to the Times reiterating two points that had already been made in the article.
1) The company doesn't record any individual identifying data collected by its billboards.
2) It would never share the data with the government or outside organizations.
This article has stirred mixed emotions by the public regarding Privacy and Digital Signage. The lack of public knowledge on the technology has had a negative effect on Audience Measurement Systems by TruMedia and Quividi.
These companies focus on providing audience analysis systems for measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and DO NOT store images or record video. There are disclaimers on both sites that they never record any image from its audience measurement installations; only qualitative data associated to the detections would be recorded and sent to the reporting tools. Why has this not stopped the public in forming this negative vibe? The Digital Signage industry needs tools to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, but are we ready for audience targeted ads that filter through gender, ethnicity, and age?
Presently a form of "targeting ads" already occurs online. When you visit a website your browsing cookies are used to track your past browsing history, or based upon where you live (using geo-tracking of your IP address) advertisers can target banner ads quite effectively. To make it worse, online activity actually leaves a trail of activity, but billboards don't do any of that since they don't know anything else about you except general information such as "a male, caucasian, between 20 and 40 years of age.
