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See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

nytimes.com

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Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#31

Post by giancarlostoro »

dsmithatx wrote: post #9

"has partnered with several companies, including AT&T, to track people’s travel patterns and behaviors through their mobile phones." Basically what I make of this is that cell phone companies (for sure AT&T) have already agreed to sell Clear Channel your location data. Do they already disseminate this information out to anyone who is willing to pay for it or is this new? Edit - I found they do and below are there are…

Not useful in most cases but setting your phone to airplane mode helps too for those who don't have opt-out links and aren't sure of this being in their carrier.

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#32

Post by guelo »

bsenftner wrote: post #6

I worked on an outdoor advertising system with tracking cameras that watched pedestrians as they passed, changing the billboard when various demographics were identified in front of the display. This was back in the 2009-2010 time frame. I was just consulting, and am pretty sure this company was purchased by someone like Clear Channel soon after. I think journalists are late to this one...

How did the camera identify the demographics? BTW this isn't using cameras, it's using location tracking from the mobile phone companies.

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#33

Post by elorant »

sixothree wrote: post #29
elorant wrote: post #2

So you block ads on your phone and next thing you know they're tracking you outdoors. Geez. We need some regulation pretty soon otherwise this whole situation will get out of hand. What if someone hacks into that billboard and routes the data elsewhere?

Next I expect they will tracking license plates and spending enormous amounts of money correlating those plates to actual people.

Or they could pay insurance companies to give them these correlations.

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#34

Post by jMyles »

elorant wrote: post #2

So you block ads on your phone and next thing you know they're tracking you outdoors. Geez. We need some regulation pretty soon otherwise this whole situation will get out of hand. What if someone hacks into that billboard and routes the data elsewhere?

But how can you ever "regulate" people seeing what happens outdoors, in public? At best, you'll force honest companies not to do it, and dishonest ones to pretend they don't.

I know that this argument applies to many things, but this one in particular seems utterly un-regulatable to me.

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#35

Post by clort »

jbob2000 wrote: post #5

Somewhat related, but is there such a thing as "peak advertising"? Like, the point at which there is so much advertising that there is no more space to advertise on? Or we become so inundated by it that it ceases to have any affect on us at all?

In Minority Report, when the hologram shouts Johns name to attract his attention as he passes by... Is that going to be peak advertising, or could it get worse than this?

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#37

Post by hackuser »

typeiierror wrote: post #17

I work peripherally in this industry, so I can provide more context to the data used here; based on the press release[i], Clear Channel is using three different types of data for this: 1) AT&T cell tower data. All major US carriers collect aggregate movement data, and some have productized it (check out Grandata and Streetlight Data if you're interested). They're likely providing something like a persons count by day…

> There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps

Why do they pay consumers when so many apps collect that data for free?

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#38

Post by vitd »

iblaine wrote: post #25
y04nn wrote: post #4

The bad thing is that you're not aware that you're followed, and they don't even bother to ask your permission. At the scale of a shopping center it may be OK, but in your daily life it's frightening. ClearChannel has the power to know you better than your best friend.

>ClearChannel has the power to know you better than your best friend. That would be true if your best friend didn't know your name, address, email, date of birth, and phone number. You see, AT&T, among others, will scrub Personally Identifiable Information("PII") from the data before sharing the data.

That would be OK if it weren't for numerous papers showing that it's essentially impossible to scrub PII and that the data can almost always be linked back to an actual person, which is exactly what all the companies involved in this market want todo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#39

Post by gohrt »

jMyles wrote: post #34
elorant wrote: post #2

So you block ads on your phone and next thing you know they're tracking you outdoors. Geez. We need some regulation pretty soon otherwise this whole situation will get out of hand. What if someone hacks into that billboard and routes the data elsewhere?

But how can you ever "regulate" people seeing what happens outdoors, in public? At best, you'll force honest companies not to do it, and dishonest ones to pretend they don't. I know that this argument applies to many things, but this one in particular seems utterly un-regulatable to me.

Companies can't be completely invisible -- they have customers and employees, they file legal and tax disclosures...

Re: See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

#40

Post by jacquesm »

betterturkey wrote: post #7

The attribution data story is really weird here. So outdoor advertisers can potentially pixel customers who see an "impression" like they do for online ads and track conversion behavior if they ultimately walk into a store? The article doesn't speak much to this, but what opt-in permission would a user give to actually allow their location to constantly be relayed to advertisers to make this possible? Would Target ne…

> So outdoor advertisers can potentially pixel customers who see an "impression" like they do for online ads and track conversion behavior if they ultimately walk into a store?

Yes, this is possible today.

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