9 ms·

See That Billboard? It May See You, Too

109 points by etruong42 11y ago

elorant 11y ago
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?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sixothree 11y ago
  Next I expect they will tracking license plates and spending enormous amounts of money correlating those plates to actual people.
  - elorant 11y ago
    Or they could pay insurance companies to give them these correlations.
    - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
      Or even the police, who last I read do sell their plate data gathered from their car cameras.
  - steveax 11y ago
    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?
- jMyles 11y ago
  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.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    Companies can't be completely invisible -- they have customers and employees, they file legal and tax disclosures...
  - megablast 11y ago
    You can ban billboards, as some forward thinking cities have done.
cfontes 11y ago
They have tried this on Shopping malls and it was a disaster, people got really pissed when this was found out. I think it's inevitable but it's not nice to know it's happening.
y04nn 11y ago
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.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  It only shows you what you give it. The only thing Amazon sends me offers about are computer peripherals because that's all I've bought through them. And Facebook only shows me travel ads because I only post details about my vacations on there. And Google only shows me ads for web hosting because most of my email is about website development. None of these services know that I'm into hobby bonsai because I've never given them that information. So if don't want to be followed and frightened by them, then limit how you use them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sgarman 11y ago
    If they see you walking into a bonsai store via billboard camera or track you walking in there via your ATT iPhone I never really "opted in" to giving them that information.
  - cliffy 11y ago
    Isn't it a bit naive to assume that companies don't share and aggregate data? Which internet search provider knows you're into hobby bonsai? You're 100% sure that data will never be shared?
  - Abundnce10 11y ago
    I don't believe this 100% true, unless you use an effective ad blocker. Data Management Platforms [0] (such as Krux, Bluekai, etc.) exist to keep track of the different sites you visit so that they can place you into various audience segments. It's unlikely they have a "bonsai" segment but you probably fall into a "gardener" segment, as the sites you visit to read about bonsai trees are most likely classified as a gardening website. Any site can signup with a DMP and offer advertisers the ability to target specific users (i.e. gardeners). Advertisers are always looking for better ways to target a specific audience, publishers are looking for ways to charge higher CPMs, and DMPs are helping both achieve their goal while tracking you across numerous sites on the internet. [0] http://digiday.com/platforms/what-is-a-dmp-data-management-platform/ http://digiday.com/platforms/what-is-a-dmp-data-management-p...
jbob2000 11y ago
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?
- RickS 11y ago
  > so much advertising that there is no more space to advertise on Facebook didn't buy Oculus because they wanted to take fruit ninja to the next level...
  - djloche 11y ago
    They bought Oculus to continue to diversify their product offerings. Facebook core will likely decline, but they'll still have Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, etc. When you have a one trick pony, and the market hands you tens of billions of dollars in exchange for a slice of your company, you buy other horses.
- chejazi 11y ago
  Digital is the new frontier, and the space is (virtually) infinite. I think the peak will be when advertisers compete against each other for your time, not your money. A person only has so much time.
  - hammock 11y ago
    We are at that point today, see the blogging around the "attention economy." Money is still the end game, luckily there is plenty of innovation happening around new ways to get you to spend more money without needing to apply any of your attention or wasting precious time.
- greenleafjacob 11y ago
  http://peakads.org/ http://peakads.org/
- amelius 11y ago
bsenftner 11y ago
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...
- guelo 11y ago
  How did the camera identify the demographics? BTW this isn't using cameras, it's using location tracking from the mobile phone companies.
  - timv 11y ago
    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.
    - executesorder66 11y ago
      Can you post of a picture of one of these adverts with one of these cameras? I'm wondering what's stopping people from just covering up the camera with tape or something. Edit: Never mind. I found one: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/05/31/business/31billboard-span-600.jpg http://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/05/31/business/31billboa...
betterturkey 11y ago
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 need to hide this in their T&C of their app and then match it against the billboard's data on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis...?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > 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.
dsmithatx 11y ago
"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 opt out links for different cell providers. http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-att-verizon-sprint-t-mobile/ http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-at...
- hammock 11y ago
  It's not new, and all the major wireless providers are in on it. To read more from the horse's mouth, check out [1] and [2] (Verizon). Not to mention many apps you have installed also sell your data - behavior, location, etc - to mobile ad networks. [3] [1]http://precisionmarketinsights.com/ http://precisionmarketinsights.com/ [2]http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/05/precision-market-insights.html http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/05/precisio... [3]http://www.conversantmedia.com/mobile-marketing-solution http://www.conversantmedia.com/mobile-marketing-solution
- vitd 11y ago
  Thank you for this! Very helpful. It worked great for AT&T. However, for Verizon, I couldn't find the settings they were talking about. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not a Verizon mobile customer (only Internet), or if they've changed it in the meantime.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  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.
  - sciurus 11y ago
    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.
tpowell 11y ago
Looks like you can opt-out here: http://att.com/cmpchoice http://att.com/cmpchoice "AT&T provides valuable insights to businesses without compromising consumer privacy. AT&T Data Patterns does not share individual data – only counts. For instance, a report might tell what percentage of passersby is males aged 20-30. Consumers are always able to opt-out of having their anonymous, aggregated information used at att.com/cmpchoice."
- dsmithatx 11y ago
  For others I found this page: http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-att-verizon-sprint-t-mobile/ http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-at...
joesmo 11y ago
"But, he added, the company was using the same data that mobile advertisers have been using for years, and showing certain ads to a specific group of consumers was not a new idea." No, that's a lie. GPS data is not available by default and can be controlled by the user. It's certainly not something that has been available for years to advertisers. It sounds like despite any permissions you may refuse in your OS/apps that AT&T will sell your data regardless (unless you opt out). Also, I know it's the NYT, but there's no such thing as anonymizing data. This has been shown over and over again that pretty much any data can be de-anonymized rather easily.
typeiierror 11y ago
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 daypart to Clear Channel at some geography, likely census block group. AT&T likely provides course demographics as well (either by purchasing them from a data broker like Experian or Epsilon) or by looking up the aggregate demo characteristics reported by the US Census for the block group of the subscribers household. As an aside, current gen (4G) cell tower data isn't very precise - maybe 100m accuracy or worse. 2) Placed opt in GPS panel data. There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps (mFour and Instantly are other examples). Placed is probably the biggest (~1mm panelists). 3) PlaceIQ mobile ad server GPS data. PlaceIQ, xAd, Factual, Verve, Ninth Decimal...all of these companies read the lat / long coordinates provided by mobile SSPs in mobile RTB bid stream to create location segment profiles associated with your phone's Ad ID. The data isn't very accurate (mobile ad fraud is a problem...an app change the GPS coord from rural Kansas to downtown Manhattan to juice their CPM in an auction; also, most of the GPS used for buying mobile inventory is via "LastKnownLocation" apis which are notoriously inaccurate). These guys generally use their data to group your Ad ID into a segment (if they see you at a Wendy's, they'll sell your Ad ID to mobile RTB bidders as a "Frequent Wendy's eater"). Clear Channel is probably using this to see if exposure to a billboard caused you to make a purchase that they can attribute to your Ad ID (say via the advertisers CRM database), or to augment the demo data from AT&T with demo segments they can buy from mobile data exchanges. [i]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005959/en/Clear-Channel-Outdoor-Americas-Launches-%E2%80%98RADAR%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005959/en/Clea...
- hackuser 11y ago
  > 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?
  - 11y ago
chinathrow 11y ago
I've heard from german address/data brokers (Schober) that they send out targeted mailings via email and then location pinpoint high value targets for product/ad category X - then they visit these locations in persona and take pictures of their houses and cars to add more data to the profiles. What a sick world this has become.
chejazi 11y ago
Introducing AdBlock for Oculus. Keep distractions to a minimum when you travel and blocking all* advertisements. *Excludes Facebook Ads
DanBC 11y ago
The UK Information Commissioner is keeping an eye on this kind of stuff. https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/how-shops-can-use-your-phone-to-track-your-every-move/ https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/how-shops-can-u...
steve_taylor 11y ago
In Soviet Russia...
stegosaurus 11y ago
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?
- schoen 11y ago
  There is one main counterexample that I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
- chockZ 11y ago
  I think you're being a bit melodramatic. Outdoor advertising is not intrusive or annoying at all when compared to other forms of advertising. It's not like I'm trying to watch a video or read a news article on the side of a bus, on a billboard or on top of a taxi. Additionally, government transit organizations make money off of the advertising sold on their vehicles and property which can in turn be used to re-invest in infrastructure to benefit the average user. Things like digital signage and free Wi-Fi are sponsored by the advertisements and improve the various transit systems they are implemented in.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    'When compared to other forms of advertising' is a cop out in my view. Those other forms are generally avoidable with either zero cost, or a (debatable) net gain. For example, one can simply choose to not watch broadcast TV, or read newspapers, preferring instead ad-free sources (which are generally better in my experience anyway). I can't opt out of outdoor advertising without leaving employment opportunities behind or moving away from family and friends. So that makes the baseline zero against something. We have Piccadilly Circus/Times Square style moving LED billboards popping up in more and more places now with inane products on them. I don't want to look at pointless consumerist nonsense all day, I want to see life, not capitalism. If you think that's easy to just 'block' I suspect you're quite different to me. Taking the LU as an example: there are ads above and in front of your head at all times, at stations (every minute) there are ads on the walls (which sometimes move), the escalators have moving LCD screens with advertising on them. Then you get outside and there's probably an advert in front of your face (because the station is a heavily trafficked area). TV is no comparison! That's 10 minutes completely ad-free with a break that you can stand up and walk away from.
ap22213 11y ago
The thing is that location 'signatures' can be created from many types of sensors, as long as they're able to record an environmental factor that is discriminable on a position. It's not important that the signature is very accurate in itself, only that enough independent signatures can be combined together to make one accurate estimate.
jhanschoo 11y ago
That reminds me of this device [1] in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
- chopin 11y ago
  You (most likely) wear one right in your pocket. Telescreens are so '84.
dansorensen712 11y ago
What an awesome and innovative project. I wish there were more techniques like this.

109 points by etruong42 11y ago

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?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sixothree 11y ago
Next I expect they will tracking license plates and spending enormous amounts of money correlating those plates to actual people.
- elorant 11y ago
  Or they could pay insurance companies to give them these correlations.
  - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
    Or even the police, who last I read do sell their plate data gathered from their car cameras.
- steveax 11y ago
  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?
jMyles 11y ago
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.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Companies can't be completely invisible -- they have customers and employees, they file legal and tax disclosures...
- megablast 11y ago
  You can ban billboards, as some forward thinking cities have done.

cfontes 11y ago

They have tried this on Shopping malls and it was a disaster, people got really pissed when this was found out. I think it's inevitable but it's not nice to know it's happening.

y04nn 11y ago

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.

jbob2000 11y ago
It only shows you what you give it. The only thing Amazon sends me offers about are computer peripherals because that's all I've bought through them. And Facebook only shows me travel ads because I only post details about my vacations on there. And Google only shows me ads for web hosting because most of my email is about website development. None of these services know that I'm into hobby bonsai because I've never given them that information. So if don't want to be followed and frightened by them, then limit how you use them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sgarman 11y ago
  If they see you walking into a bonsai store via billboard camera or track you walking in there via your ATT iPhone I never really "opted in" to giving them that information.
- cliffy 11y ago
  Isn't it a bit naive to assume that companies don't share and aggregate data? Which internet search provider knows you're into hobby bonsai? You're 100% sure that data will never be shared?
- Abundnce10 11y ago
  I don't believe this 100% true, unless you use an effective ad blocker. Data Management Platforms [0] (such as Krux, Bluekai, etc.) exist to keep track of the different sites you visit so that they can place you into various audience segments. It's unlikely they have a "bonsai" segment but you probably fall into a "gardener" segment, as the sites you visit to read about bonsai trees are most likely classified as a gardening website. Any site can signup with a DMP and offer advertisers the ability to target specific users (i.e. gardeners). Advertisers are always looking for better ways to target a specific audience, publishers are looking for ways to charge higher CPMs, and DMPs are helping both achieve their goal while tracking you across numerous sites on the internet. [0] http://digiday.com/platforms/what-is-a-dmp-data-management-platform/ http://digiday.com/platforms/what-is-a-dmp-data-management-p...

jbob2000 11y ago

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?

RickS 11y ago
> so much advertising that there is no more space to advertise on Facebook didn't buy Oculus because they wanted to take fruit ninja to the next level...
- djloche 11y ago
  They bought Oculus to continue to diversify their product offerings. Facebook core will likely decline, but they'll still have Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, etc. When you have a one trick pony, and the market hands you tens of billions of dollars in exchange for a slice of your company, you buy other horses.
chejazi 11y ago
Digital is the new frontier, and the space is (virtually) infinite. I think the peak will be when advertisers compete against each other for your time, not your money. A person only has so much time.
- hammock 11y ago
  We are at that point today, see the blogging around the "attention economy." Money is still the end game, luckily there is plenty of innovation happening around new ways to get you to spend more money without needing to apply any of your attention or wasting precious time.
greenleafjacob 11y ago
http://peakads.org/ http://peakads.org/
amelius 11y ago

bsenftner 11y ago

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...

guelo 11y ago
How did the camera identify the demographics? BTW this isn't using cameras, it's using location tracking from the mobile phone companies.
- timv 11y ago
  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.
  - executesorder66 11y ago
    Can you post of a picture of one of these adverts with one of these cameras? I'm wondering what's stopping people from just covering up the camera with tape or something. Edit: Never mind. I found one: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/05/31/business/31billboard-span-600.jpg http://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/05/31/business/31billboa...

betterturkey 11y ago

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 need to hide this in their T&C of their app and then match it against the billboard's data on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis...?

jacquesm 11y ago
> 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.

dsmithatx 11y ago

"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 opt out links for different cell providers. http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-att-verizon-sprint-t-mobile/ http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-at...

hammock 11y ago
It's not new, and all the major wireless providers are in on it. To read more from the horse's mouth, check out [1] and [2] (Verizon). Not to mention many apps you have installed also sell your data - behavior, location, etc - to mobile ad networks. [3] [1]http://precisionmarketinsights.com/ http://precisionmarketinsights.com/ [2]http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/05/precision-market-insights.html http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2013/05/precisio... [3]http://www.conversantmedia.com/mobile-marketing-solution http://www.conversantmedia.com/mobile-marketing-solution
vitd 11y ago
Thank you for this! Very helpful. It worked great for AT&T. However, for Verizon, I couldn't find the settings they were talking about. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not a Verizon mobile customer (only Internet), or if they've changed it in the meantime.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
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.
- sciurus 11y ago
  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.

tpowell 11y ago

Looks like you can opt-out here: http://att.com/cmpchoice http://att.com/cmpchoice "AT&T provides valuable insights to businesses without compromising consumer privacy. AT&T Data Patterns does not share individual data – only counts. For instance, a report might tell what percentage of passersby is males aged 20-30. Consumers are always able to opt-out of having their anonymous, aggregated information used at att.com/cmpchoice."

dsmithatx 11y ago
For others I found this page: http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-att-verizon-sprint-t-mobile/ http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-disable-data-tracking-on-at...

joesmo 11y ago

"But, he added, the company was using the same data that mobile advertisers have been using for years, and showing certain ads to a specific group of consumers was not a new idea." No, that's a lie. GPS data is not available by default and can be controlled by the user. It's certainly not something that has been available for years to advertisers. It sounds like despite any permissions you may refuse in your OS/apps that AT&T will sell your data regardless (unless you opt out). Also, I know it's the NYT, but there's no such thing as anonymizing data. This has been shown over and over again that pretty much any data can be de-anonymized rather easily.

typeiierror 11y ago

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 daypart to Clear Channel at some geography, likely census block group. AT&T likely provides course demographics as well (either by purchasing them from a data broker like Experian or Epsilon) or by looking up the aggregate demo characteristics reported by the US Census for the block group of the subscribers household. As an aside, current gen (4G) cell tower data isn't very precise - maybe 100m accuracy or worse. 2) Placed opt in GPS panel data. There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps (mFour and Instantly are other examples). Placed is probably the biggest (~1mm panelists). 3) PlaceIQ mobile ad server GPS data. PlaceIQ, xAd, Factual, Verve, Ninth Decimal...all of these companies read the lat / long coordinates provided by mobile SSPs in mobile RTB bid stream to create location segment profiles associated with your phone's Ad ID. The data isn't very accurate (mobile ad fraud is a problem...an app change the GPS coord from rural Kansas to downtown Manhattan to juice their CPM in an auction; also, most of the GPS used for buying mobile inventory is via "LastKnownLocation" apis which are notoriously inaccurate). These guys generally use their data to group your Ad ID into a segment (if they see you at a Wendy's, they'll sell your Ad ID to mobile RTB bidders as a "Frequent Wendy's eater"). Clear Channel is probably using this to see if exposure to a billboard caused you to make a purchase that they can attribute to your Ad ID (say via the advertisers CRM database), or to augment the demo data from AT&T with demo segments they can buy from mobile data exchanges. [i]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005959/en/Clear-Channel-Outdoor-Americas-Launches-%E2%80%98RADAR%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005959/en/Clea...

hackuser 11y ago
> 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?
- 11y ago

chinathrow 11y ago

I've heard from german address/data brokers (Schober) that they send out targeted mailings via email and then location pinpoint high value targets for product/ad category X - then they visit these locations in persona and take pictures of their houses and cars to add more data to the profiles. What a sick world this has become.

chejazi 11y ago

Introducing AdBlock for Oculus. Keep distractions to a minimum when you travel and blocking all* advertisements. *Excludes Facebook Ads

DanBC 11y ago

The UK Information Commissioner is keeping an eye on this kind of stuff. https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/how-shops-can-use-your-phone-to-track-your-every-move/ https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/how-shops-can-u...

steve_taylor 11y ago

In Soviet Russia...

stegosaurus 11y ago

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?

schoen 11y ago
There is one main counterexample that I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
chockZ 11y ago
I think you're being a bit melodramatic. Outdoor advertising is not intrusive or annoying at all when compared to other forms of advertising. It's not like I'm trying to watch a video or read a news article on the side of a bus, on a billboard or on top of a taxi. Additionally, government transit organizations make money off of the advertising sold on their vehicles and property which can in turn be used to re-invest in infrastructure to benefit the average user. Things like digital signage and free Wi-Fi are sponsored by the advertisements and improve the various transit systems they are implemented in.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  'When compared to other forms of advertising' is a cop out in my view. Those other forms are generally avoidable with either zero cost, or a (debatable) net gain. For example, one can simply choose to not watch broadcast TV, or read newspapers, preferring instead ad-free sources (which are generally better in my experience anyway). I can't opt out of outdoor advertising without leaving employment opportunities behind or moving away from family and friends. So that makes the baseline zero against something. We have Piccadilly Circus/Times Square style moving LED billboards popping up in more and more places now with inane products on them. I don't want to look at pointless consumerist nonsense all day, I want to see life, not capitalism. If you think that's easy to just 'block' I suspect you're quite different to me. Taking the LU as an example: there are ads above and in front of your head at all times, at stations (every minute) there are ads on the walls (which sometimes move), the escalators have moving LCD screens with advertising on them. Then you get outside and there's probably an advert in front of your face (because the station is a heavily trafficked area). TV is no comparison! That's 10 minutes completely ad-free with a break that you can stand up and walk away from.

ap22213 11y ago

The thing is that location 'signatures' can be created from many types of sensors, as long as they're able to record an environmental factor that is discriminable on a position. It's not important that the signature is very accurate in itself, only that enough independent signatures can be combined together to make one accurate estimate.

jhanschoo 11y ago

That reminds me of this device [1] in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

chopin 11y ago
You (most likely) wear one right in your pocket. Telescreens are so '84.

dansorensen712 11y ago

What an awesome and innovative project. I wish there were more techniques like this.