Computerized
placards are literally watching you — and they may even follow you home.
By
OK people, we need to discuss billboards. Yes, we really must.
At best, these giant corporate placards are problematic — they
loom garishly over us, clutter our landscapes, and intrude into our communities
with no respect for local aesthetics or preferences.
Now, however, billboards
are getting a high-tech reboot, allowing advertisers to invade not only our
places, but also our privacy.
Having to see billboards everywhere is bad enough. Far worse,
though, is that the modernized, digitalized, computerized structures can see
you — and track you.
Using your own mobile phone, they can then follow your travel
patterns and consumer behavior.
Aggregating that information with other
available data, Clear Channel can then know the average age and gender of
passersby who see an ad on a particular billboard and know whether they later
make purchases.
It’s “a bit creepy,” admits Andy Stevens — Clear Channel’s own vice president
for “research and insights.”
Stevens rationalizes the company’s zippy new Orwellian
billboards as just another step into the digital future: “We’re just tapping
into an existing data ecosystem,” he shrugs. The millions
of profiles collected by Clear Channel are “obviously…very valuable to an
advertiser.”
Yet maybe they’re more valuable to those of us who treasure our
privacy and have given no permission to be targeted and tracked by a billboard
huckster. And we thought government spying was out of control.
For information on corporate snooping, go to www.epic.org.
OtherWords
columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
He’s the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org.