Billboards Can Now Watch Us

​In the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, a fugitive in a dystopian, film-noir future. As Anderton walks through a mall, he is haunted by targeted ads in full-motion video on digital billboards. The boards read Anderton’s retinas and scan his face, identify him, and call out “Hey, John Anderton!” – look at this Lexus, this new Bulgari fragrance, this special offer from Guinness!
 
Anderton appears brutalized as he and other passersby walk briskly and look straight ahead to avoid the digital catcalls around them.
 
What was sci-fi in 2002 is reality in 2024. You’ve probably seen a digital billboard with vibrant animation and high production values. What’s not immediately apparent is that they can also be interactive, based on face-scanning and the integration of mobile data exploited by the “out-of-home” advertising business.
 
“Going about the world with the feeling that cameras are not just recording video but analyzing you as a person to shape your reality is an uncomfortable concept,” writes Big Brother Watch, a UK-based civil liberties and privacy organization in a white paper, The Streets Are Watching You. Some examples from Big Brother:
 

• In 2016, TV doctor Hillary Jones peered out at passersby from digital billboards across England to offer them health tips based on their appearance.

 

• In 2017 at a shopping center in a London suburb, a billboard advertising for a children’s movie scanned and analyzed the faces of almost everyone who walked by. The billboard overlaid the faces of passersby and matched each person to an emoji that reflected their gender and apparent emotional state.

 

• In 2021, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote to Lyft and Uber to complain of targeted advertising on screens in the back seats of ride-sharing cars. Passengers who use Lyft and Uber, the senators wrote, should “have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

 

• In 2022, a charity dedicated to the prevention of suicide put up a digital billboard in Manchester with the face of a sad-looking girl whose expression became happier the more pedestrians cast their eyes on the billboard.

 
This tracking is enabled by cameras and facial recognition and enhanced by the synthesis of consumers’ movement data, spatial data, and audience data, collected by our apps and reported to advertisers by our smartphones. Audience data is collected by mobile advertising ID (MAIDS), which cross-references behavior on one app to others and matches those insights with tracking software to create a personal profile. While supposedly anonymized, MAIDS can be reverse engineered to work out someone’s actual identity.
 
We have an additional concern about hyper-targeted advertising and advertising surveillance. This sector is raising billions of dollars in capital to build out an infrastructure of surveillance in the UK. If this practice also spreads across the United States, the data generated could easily be accessed by the U.S. federal government to warrantlessly surveil Americans. After all, about a dozen U.S. agencies – ranging from the FBI to the IRS – already purchase Americans’ digital data from third-party data brokers and access it without warrants.
 
Congress can prevent this technology from being unfurled in the United States. The U.S. Senate can also take the next step by passing the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, passed by the House, which forbids the warrantless collection of Americans’ most personal and sensitive data.
 
In the meantime, go to p. 35 of Big Brother’s “The Streets Are Watching You” report to see how Apple iPhone and Android users can protect themselves from phone trackers and location harvesting.
 
We wouldn’t want to do what John Anderton did – have a technician pluck out our eyes and replace them with someone else’s. Replacing one’s face would presumably take a lot more work.