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Ford Wants Billboards to Beam Distracting Ads to Screens Inside Your Car
- Arrath 5y agoWhat a terrible idea and not only for the chance of distracting the driver. Lets put our tinfoil hats on for a moment and imagine that the developers of this system don't properly sanitize the input from whatever sensors look for this advertising data. Now there is another ingress route for a malicious actor.
- sergiotapia 5y agoWill cars start costing $2000 to offset all the money they are going to make off the cancer that is advertising?
- sumtechguy 5y agoSure at first then like cable TV it will suddenly cost a lot more later.
- Black101 5y agoYes, but to make the cars safe, they will force you to stop at every Walmart along the way so that you can safely watch the ads.
- quotha 5y agoFord wants money.
- yellow_lead 5y agoThis is clickbait. "Wants to" and "filed a patent to" are completely different things.
- Akinato 5y agoI'm not so sure. Spending the time (and money) researching it and developing a patent tends to indicate a desire for them to integrate the technology. I'd argue against "is going to", but "wants to" seems fairly correct.
- jcranmer 5y agoFor a large company, filing a patent is probably a sign that some team internally has looked at implementing it. I'd expect that there is some sort of internal budget dedicated towards filing patents, and an internal team in charge of deciding which internal patent applications are worth actually pursuing. While ideally you'd want to focus on patents for things you're actively pursuing, if there's budget for more patents and the latest set of applications are weak, then the team could end up pursuing applications that the development team has no intention of pursuing further. In that vein, I'd suggest that "wants to" is a stronger description of intent than actually happens with corporate patent filings.
- crooked-v 5y agoAnd one can't forget defensive patent filing, where companies will file patents on anything and every idea they can come up with even tangentially related to what management actually wants, as a way of preventing somebody else from doing the same and then suing them over any overlapping elements.
- grecy 5y agoI'm always floored when I read about legacy automakers coming up with increasingly more esoteric gimmicks to make money or supposedly make their cars "better". Ideas like massage seats, MORE screens, soft close doors, built in coolers, etc. etc. They do all of this instead of the most obvious and straightforward thing they SHOULD be doing: Building better vehicles. In the near future they'll all be begging for bailouts yet again, and it will be because they keep focusing on stupid features instead of actually making their products better.
- AareyBaba 5y agoI want a car that warns you that your headlights are off when driving at night. I want a car with spare headlight bulbs built into the headlights so when one burns out the spare automatically turns on and a warning is displayed that you need to replace a headlight.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoLED headlights are becoming standard, and they have a much longer lifespan than traditional bulbs. Even my 2014 Toyota Corolla (without basic luxuries such as cruise control) has LED headlights.
- aitchnyu 5y agoHow do you define better?
- elil17 5y agoIf you read the actual patent filing and look at their claims strategy it's very clear that what they want to be able to do is have it so when you drive by a billboard or road sign you can press something on your car's navigation display to navigate there. That seems like a useful navigation feature (e.g., for getting to a gas station) and not at all related to "beaming distracting ads into your car."
- robalfonso 5y agoI would add to this; I’ve driven by billboards and actually wanted the phone number/website but didn’t catch it in time. So while like anything it could be abused. It also serves a useful purpose
- Akinato 5y agoI'd hope it would just be a simple button to "bookmark" the content or program the coordinates into your navigation. Otherwise this seems like the exact kind of distracted driving that most distracted driving laws are trying to prevent.
- capableweb 5y agoHaving your navigation display change because a company want to divert you from your destination sounds exactly like "beaming distracting ads into my car". Even a message will distract people more than necessary, humans already prove their focus is poor as hell. It'll feel like your car has a life of it's own, and that life is now capitalism.
- reader_mode 5y agoI don't see why this couldn't be toggled off with a simple setting.
- bobthepanda 5y agoIt really should be opt-in then, not opt-out.
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- whymauri 5y agoBeaming ads onto mobile or mobile-like devices is an inevitable trend we're going to see over the next decade. For example, most TV watchers actually attend to their phone over the TV. How long will it be before Galaxy phones start beaming Samsung TV ads to your device? And Apple TVs? If they (TV manufacturers) all align on this, there's no real escape. Cars are just a canary, I think. And a dangerous one at that thanks to driver distraction. But longer term, as we get better autonomous driving systems, expect the interior of "your" vehicle to get plastered with advertisement. Welcome to the future!
- alanbernstein 5y agoThere is an escape, for now: stop connecting things to the internet when they don't need to be. Of course, there is nothing stopping the industry from replacing HDMI with a standard that must include an internet connection...
- pdimitar 5y agoThey already did, I know that HDMI 2.0 includes Ethernet and if the host (computer or TV stick) has internet it will transparently share it with the TV which can then happily install updates and show you ads.
- mywittyname 5y agoDo they make HDMI prophylactics yet?
- cblconfederate 5y agoOoof that explains the huge screens in electric cars. Not for me please, tiny screens, if i want to watch videos i have a phone.
- syntheticnature 5y agoMakes me think a bit of https://escapepod.org/2013/05/16/ep396-dead-merchandise/ https://escapepod.org/2013/05/16/ep396-dead-merchandise/
- jollybean 5y agoThere's a use case for showing information that's hyper local. I hope that it's done fairly, I don't think it will be ... On the highway you get signs for 'McDonald's at this Exit' which is actually useful. Of course, a lot of regular signage would be useful as well. A display in front of you that showed you the 'current exit' - and frankly the current speed limit would be great. From a positioning perspective, maybe Ford should do that: shows you the current, civic signage including speed limit, exits, nearest gas etc.. These are the systems I wish were designed for the mom & pop shops to participate. I'm wary that with private interests, it won't be the case.
- r00fus 5y agoI most of this from my GPS Nav or CarPlay/AndroidAuto interface already. A/Gmaps could do better on telling you what's passing by. This patent would just put billboard content (mainly directions/contact) into such an interface.
- Shadonototro 5y agonow that i think about it, distracting ads on the road should be illegal, it can distract the driver
- lotsofpulp 5y agoBillboards should be illegal period. They’re unnecessary eyesores. It’s jarring whenever I travel to places with them.
- Shadonototro 5y agoi agree with you
- matheusmoreira 5y agoThey'd put ads under people's eyelids if they could.
- MikeUt 5y agoBut ad-sponsored medical procedures would be so much more affordable.
- heavyset_go 5y agoFuturama got this right with ads being broadcasted into people's dreams.
- ralphg 5y agoThis looks like a useful method for self driving cars.
- nverno 5y agoStopped reading after first line 'Advertisers are motivated by a singular goal, and that is to turn every facet of human existence into an opportunity to show you ads.' I realized this is click bait, but it could still be improved with some subtlety. Guide the reader to the conclusions you want with information instead of starting off with this nonsense.
- cortesoft 5y agoThat sentence bothered me right off the bat, too. In fact, I have it copied because I was going to comment on it. ‘Advertisers’ would actually love for ads to be super rare... and only have their ad ever be shown. Their true desire is to have as many people as possible purchase their product. Advertising space sellers ‘singular goal’ is to get paid as much as possible from advertisers. They probably want fewer overall ads to be displayed, because that would make their space to display ads more valuable. They would love to be the only place ads are displayed. Ad brokers are probably the only ones who really want ads everywhere, because they make money on volume.
- soared 5y agoFor context, this type of advertising falls into "digital out of home" or DOOH. DOOH is going to be the next big thing (connected TV like roku/etc is the current big thing). Consider how antiquated a normal billboard is, when you could make it digital and get many more features. This vendor has a cool map you can see of all their screens. Most of them are the small screens on gas stations/stores/etc, but some are billboards. They recently signed a deal to put digital signage on top of ubers and taxis (but not inside the car). I'm not affiliated but attended a pitch of theirs. https://www.adomni.com/inventory https://www.adomni.com/inventory
- nerdponx 5y agoThese taxi and gas station video ads suck. Eventually we need laws against intruding on people's mental space with this shit. Nothing else will stop the bloodsucking advertisement monster.
- soared 5y agoI do agree that the taxi and gas station ads suck. It’s very early days for this, so things are likely to change.
- deepsun 5y agoThat reminds me of a science fiction novel (Azimov?), which starts with the main character driving a car full of annoying distracting ads, and the richest companies made ads that were just silence.
- anigbrowl 5y agoYup. Regarding the silent ads, State Farm (an insurance firm) literally does that now. They have a genial looking spokesperson and run mildly comedic soft-sell adverts, then follow up a few months later with a sequel that has no dialog at all but gently reminds viewers of the midly comedic campaign. It's brilliant psychology.
- aasasd 5y agoWhile the article is just another trash piece, there's a short story by ‘Henry Kuttner’ describing pretty much the future into which we're heading with electronics all over the place and everything connected to the web, in conjunction with the ad industry. It's basically the definitive text on the topic for me. The story is called ‘Year Day’, and it should be in the public domain unless renewed somehow—however a quick search for the text turns up nothing. It was first published in the collection ‘Ahead of Time’. (‘Henry Kuttner’ is pretty much another pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and his wife and co-author C.L. Moore.)
- Clent 5y agoIntrusive use case. I can see a useful new trim feature as long as it is onl presented as a data point offered to platforms like Apple CarPlay; surfaced or not based on user settings. I see value in being able to flip through a list of most recently viewed billboards.
- LinuxBender 5y agoI was looking at getting a new truck. The Ford F550 Lariat is nice, but I am not paying for anything that can receive messages I did not request. There better be an off-menu option for a no-internet, no-bluetooth, no-RF, no-ODB3 or I will just stick with old used vehicles.
- rektide 5y agoIgnoring cars for a moment, it's just super sad to me how bad the state of ad-hoc connectivity is. This is fairly car specific, but there was some ok ad-hoc networking work in 802.11p, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE)[1]. Using a low-bit rate wireless channel to allow, effectively, broadcasting. Now everyone wants to get on cellular, which seems like it's probably an industry play, to lock in cell phone providers, to make sure consumers don't get access. Allegedly some occasional forms of v2v (vehicle to vehicle) or v2i (vehicle to infrastructure & reverse) do have a local "broadcast" form of cellular, that doesn't rely entirely upon existing cellular networks, but all this cellular stuff feels like a colossal degradation versus a fairly understandable, simple wifi system, that we failed with only through lack of trying. There was Google's Physical Web[2], using a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon to broadcast a very short URL. That was integrated into Android! A notification could pop up! Ripe for abuse and bad, but it's the sort of thing I really wish the good & excited people had seized upon, had built something with. Incredible amount of potential and power. No longer developed, dropped from Android proper, but it's a simple specification, easy to implement in a couple hours. Google did a damned good job building, standardizing, promoting, trying, & this could be one instrumental way to have things in the world be able to advertise themselves digitally. There's wifi-aware[3], for Neighbor Aware Networking, but it's hard to assess this tech. It all seems locked up being gummy sticky gnarly Apple and Android uses. There's no interop. But supposedly it's something to help us connect with those about us. I think there are some IEEE 802.11 standards in here somewhere, but wifi alliance are generally not super nice people who don't share & who keep consumers in the dark & let Apple and Google & occasional other huge player monopolize use of the technology they stamp their name on, alas. Don't get me wrong, I'm afraid of a world where information & ads & other things bombard us, come at us from everywhere. But it distresses me to no end that we have almost no means to digitally connect with someone standing right next to us. That hopping on the same wifi is one of the only options. Or using some proprietary non-standard system that knows our identity & is tracking us, be it Google or Apple doing that tracking, doing that gatekeeping. It's weird as heck to me how advanced communications infrastructure is, but how it's still so fantastically centralized & top-down, and starting to get systems that allow us to be aware of other information resources is high on my interest list. That said, this article, especially with Vice's typical aggressive spin on the headline, doesn't sound particularly interesting or wanted to me, but it's in an area that seems radically under-examined, under-developed, that has had a fair share of could-be players pass by without making an impact. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p [2] http://google.github.io/physical-web/ http://google.github.io/physical-web/ [3] https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-aware https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-aware
- TheBill 5y ago1) Waze has been doing this for a while which addresses context as they're only served to a geofenced area: https://www.waze.com/business/ https://www.waze.com/business/ 2) QR Codes & Lane Assist cameras. Boom, done. Pay $F a bunch of $/BTC/RUB to put your companies ads on their allow list, no allow list, no open URL for Johnny Drop Tables.
- youeseh 5y agoThis will become much more a thing when cars drive themselves. Now your attention is freed up to watch ads!
- kwdc 5y agoAh! Now I understand why we need self-driving cars. The driver's real purpose is become a passenger so they can watch advertisements.
- EMM_386 5y ago> The company's patent filing describes a system that would equip cars with billboard-reading sensors, allowing cars to scan roadside signs for relevant information and then display them on screens inside smart cars. This is absurd, why would they need "billboard-reading sensors"? All they would need is the car's access to GPS. If an advertiser wants in-Ford ads to go along with a billboard, famous landmark, or a famous person's house they can do that. I see zero needs for the archaic concept of a "billboard" to need to transmit data to a car in the future.
- mgarfias 5y agoNope
- runlevel1 5y agoI hope this doesn't go the way of Smart TVs. Smart TVs violate your privacy [1] and push you ads [2] on a device you already paid good money for. But every major manufacturer has stopped producing dumb TVs, so what choice do we have? [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/what-vizio-was-doing-behind-tv-screen https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/... [2]: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/ https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/