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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

#41

Post by typeiierror »

hackuser wrote: post #37
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?

A couple of reasons - data quality and usage restrictions are the top. Here's an example - say I'm Big Box Retailer & Co and I want to measure how many people who visit my store also visited my competitor, Small Box Retailer Inc. Where can I go to buy that data?

-Facebook or Google don't sell their raw user data. They can tell me how effective the ads I placed on their sites were at driving visits or sales by matching my customer's email & phone numbers to their users (see [1] and [2]), but they won't give me data on my competitor, and the data will always be aggregated. So on to the next idea..

-Mobile ad server data aggregators might sell me their raw data, but the quality isn't great. Sure, they track 100m+ devices...but how many times do they see each of those devices a day? For most devices it's 10 times or less, so you're going to have a big problem with false negatives (people who visited Big Box Retailer and Small Box Retailer, but due to the sparsity of the data I miss one of those visits). On to the next...

-Foursquare is newly in the data business, but despite having a big audience (50m MAU), only ~1.3m users have opted in for continuous measurement ([3]). On top of that, Foursquare's audience is pretty skewed - if Big Box Retailer's customers are older, I'm going to have trouble finding them in Foursquare's data set, which means the effective size of their 1.3m 'panel' is really something like 200k-500k. On top of that, I can't survey them to verify they actually visited Small Box Retailer instead of the McDonalds next store, since the GPS data Foursquare pulls is LastKnown instead of exact.

-...so if the only data I can buy on the open market is skewed, not really that big (not to mention collected under potentially dubious privacy policies), whats my alternative? Thats the need these panels are filling.

As an aside, if you're curious what apps on your phone are collecting your location data, you can use a self-hosted MITM server w/ SSL decryption to sniff your own traffic. Here's own for Android: https://code.google.com/archive/p/sandrop/

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-touts-mobile-ad-technolog... [2] http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-gives-retaile... [3] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/attribution-by-foursquare/

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

#42

Post by Absentinsomniac »

elorant wrote: post #33
sixothree wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or even the police, who last I read do sell their plate data gathered from their car cameras.

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

#43

Post by steveax »

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 from the auto insurance companies who offer per miles rates if you install their trackers, or the States implementing mileage based gas tax tracking gizmos. What could go wrong?

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

#45

Post by retbull »

typeiierror wrote: post #41
hackuser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A couple of reasons - data quality and usage restrictions are the top. Here's an example - say I'm Big Box Retailer & Co and I want to measure how many people who visit my store also visited my competitor, Small Box Retailer Inc. Where can I go to buy that data? -Facebook or Google don't sell their raw user data. They can tell me how effective the ads I placed on their sites were at driving visits or sales by matchin…

In addition to this people do things to their phones that make data useless quite often. They turn off their gps, root the phone and change the clock so they can cheat at games, use location spoofing apps so they can pretend to be somewhere else on tinder. Then on top of that it can be hard to tell where people are even with gps on because being in a building screws it up. There are several solutions to that problem but nothing is perfect.

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

#46

Post by timv »

guelo wrote: post #32
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.

Not the parent poster, but I also worked in the tech space of outdoor advertising.

The camera based systems I saw used facial detection. The vendors were very keen to refer to "detection" not "recognition" since they (supposedly) only looked at faces and analysed them for demographic information, they didn't track you as an individual. (I'm sure they would have eventually - there's too much money at stake to not track someone's movements and show them relevant ads)

There's lots of vendors of facial detection software than claim to be able to detect:

- age

- gender

- ethnicity

- mood (though that one's a bit suspect)

- where your attention is focused

Most of the software does a decent enough job of most of those.

Some vendors would use the camera to track how many people watched the ad, their age/gender breakdown, how long it held their attention, etc. In those cases it was just about providing "performance" reporting to the advertiser. Often they would have minimum audience guarantees, and would keep running the ad until it hit its levels.

Others tried to target specific ads to specific demographics. They'd have a bunch of ads loaded, and would pick which one to show based on the demographics of current audience.

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

#47

Post by stegosaurus »

What I worry about with all of this is the massive loss in productivity. As far as I'm concerned, there is a very clear externality here.

If I walk through a city center and I'm bombarded with unavoidable billboards, it's just not good for my brain. I don't want it, it's pollution, poison. I would love a real-life ad blocker for public transport, for example.

So what happens next? When do cities, local governments (London boroughs, say) start to care? Do they ever start to care that commutes, everyday lives of citizens are being destroyed (is there a clear enough causal link)?

Or do we have to wait until people like me start moving out of the city because they don't want to see bollocks flashing lights everywhere, they don't want to walk through a Minority Report like scene of pervasive unavoidable attention grabbers?

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

#48

Post by schoen »

stegosaurus wrote: post #47

What I worry about with all of this is the massive loss in productivity. As far as I'm concerned, there is a very clear externality here. If I walk through a city center and I'm bombarded with unavoidable billboards, it's just not good for my brain. I don't want it, it's pollution, poison. I would love a real-life ad blocker for public transport, for example. So what happens next? When do cities, local governments (L…

There is one main counterexample that I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

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

#49

Post by y04nn »

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.

The point it that by monitoring your location I can derive what is your schedule, where you work, where you do your shopping, the pharmacie you are going to, I can know what kind of food you like by looking what kind of restaurant you go, I can know that after work you are regularly going to an hotel for 2 hours, I know where you live, where you kids are going to school, when and where you take your vacation. By looking who's around you I can know who are your friends and how close you are. With all that information, I don't care about your name, I can put you in a category, classify you better that anyone else. If every billboard is equipped with such thing that can be a problem for privacy.

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

#50

Post by sciurus »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #31
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.

I don't see how disabling close to all the functionality of your phone is a solution. Sure, they can't track me, but nobody can call me either.
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