Clear Channel Outdoor Americas will announce on Monday that they have partnered with several companies, including AT&T, to track people’s travel patterns and behaviors through their mobile phones. They will be able to conclude who is looking at their billboard not with retina-scanning cameras, but by aggregating the data collected by several partners and location data from your telephone. This will allow ClearChannel to determine the average age, gender and perhaps spending habits of the traffic around their billboards, allowing them to place more targeted ads. Digital billboards in cities will become more like web banners now, changing depending on the traffic that arrives. This reminds me of "the Disturbance" when a privacy group in Sweden 'hacked' data-collecting boxes that track people walking through city centers via their ever-present cellphones. DFRI, the Swedish organisation for digital rights, literally jammed the boxes by giving them tons of junk information instead. The New York Times reports that privacy advocates in the US have raised concerns about the tracking.
“People have no idea that they’re being tracked and targeted,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “It is incredibly creepy, and it’s the most recent intrusion into our privacy.”
"Radar" which is the high-tech billboards will start on Monday in New York City and Los angeles, and will roll out in other large cities later.
“In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like,” said Andy Stevens, senior vice president for research and insights at Clear Channel Outdoor. “Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.” Clear Channel and its partners — AT&T Data Patterns, a unit of AT&T that collects location data from its subscribers; PlaceIQ, which uses location data collected from other apps to help determine consumer behavior; and Placed, which pays consumers for the right to track their movements and is able to link exposure to ads to in-store visits — all insist that they protect the privacy of consumers. All data is anonymous and aggregated, they say, meaning individual consumers cannot be identified.
