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The system is apparently tracking age and gender of people visiting the information kiosk. This hardly seems like invasive tracking. Even tracking an individual
by bdamm 6y ago
The system is apparently tracking age and gender of people visiting the information kiosk. This hardly seems like invasive tracking. Even tracking an individual's movement through the mall with the purpose of providing security and marketing analysis seems like a ho-hum no big deal to me.
If they were then taking the data and finding those people through Ring or youtube videos, sharing the pictures of people with companies to learn the earning power or tax history of a person, or using pictures of people and the store they visit to sell to Amazon or Facebook, then it would seem a step too far.
- catsncomputers 6y agoits very similar to what a company called Locarise do in Japan. It's not identifying anyone, merely seeing buyer hotspots, queues, recording visitor numbers, etc. All very valuable to a mall and imo quite harmless to the user if they are not identified
- reaperducer 6y agoThere's no such thing as anonymous data. The ad-tech industry wouldn't exist if there was.
- ebalit 6y agoThere are anonymous data that are interesting for advertising. The number of people passing by a location is anonymous in itself. It seems however that in the case of the Canadian mall implementation (or more precisely their solution provider) they stored more than this number, losing the anonymous property of a system they sold as an "Anonymous Video Analytics". In my opinion, something should be called anonymous if and only if you cannot go back from the stored data to a personally identifiable information.
- thatcat 6y agoThey could later choose to sell this data and the buyer could deanonymize it by merging it with other purchased databases.
- donmcronald 6y ago> This hardly seems like invasive tracking. For now. Give it a while and they'll be looking up your credit score as you walk through the door.