Minority Report Has Arrived – Facial Tracking & Recognition Being Used To Serve Targeted Ads (VIDEO)
Digital Trends first blogged about Minority Report style ads hitting Japan. Using facial recognition technology, cameras would be able to determine gender and age to serve targeted ads. Now, CNN has a video showing how the tech works and it’s pretty fascinating stuff. It’s obviously not at the polished Minority Report “Hollywood” level, but this shows that a lot of the tech we saw in the movie, is already becoming a reality less than 10 years later – especially in the Augmented Reality space. Case in point, John Underkoffler’s presentation at TED showed off a working prototype of the famous “tom cruise gestural interface” from Minority Report.
As for the ads themselves, there will probably be major privacy concerns around this as it’s not clear yet how you would opt in or out of these types of ads. Think about it for a second – unless you’re physically carrying a smartphone or other mobile device that could block the signal, the only other way would be for some type of National Database where you would opt out of this service. A futuristic version of the Do Not Call list. Otherwise, you have the Blade Runner option where you can fool facial detection with funky makeup as shown below…
How do you see this working from a privacy aspect? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter @kobrakai.
See more at CNN or in video embed (unfortunately with ancient 30 second pre-roll – but that’s what browser tabs were created for…)