"A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.
Face recognition, behaviour analysing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.
Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.
'There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalised location advertising, whether it is on your cellphone or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores,' says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.
'This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable.'
Emotional reactions
New surveillance technology could even evaporate the advertiser's favourite grouse that 'half of advertising is wasted, but we don't know which half'.
Advertisers are turning to 'intelligent' digital billboards that use cameras to watch you watching the ads.
In Germany, developers have placed video cameras into street advertisements attempting to discern people's emotional reactions to the ads, according to the Washington-based privacy advocate outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
It warns that this type of surveillance encroaches on civil liberties. Such face, voice and behaviour technology could be a means of tracking individuals on a mass level across their entire lives, it says.
Pushed by the demands of advertisers and security-minded governments, these technologies are becoming so increasingly smart and intrusive that they now resemble something out of science fiction, it warns. ...more
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