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by bimmer44 3585 days ago
Some business ideas from the 2.4GHz dystopia:

* Using wifi in a movie theatre to build a Google Analytics equivalent for movie studios. Total heartbeat and respiration data for every individual "user session" across all screenings. Devices like Roku could do this too and sell the data to Netflix.

* Amazon Echo could notice your heartrate is becoming elevated due to the start of flu - Amazon stages your go-to remedies in the nearest DC and pushes appropriate ads on the site.

* In store movement tracking. Why bother with phone beacons and hassle-some devices randomising their MAC addresses when you could just power up a wifi blanket and track bodies with precision.

I guess the lab setting of the above research wouldn't apply to these situations - but I imagine with more research and some specialised equipment a movie theatre could be made conducive to this kind of tracking? Would there be legal implications? Wifi is everywhere already...

5 comments

> Devices like Roku could do this too and sell the data to Netflix.

Or allow studios to block playback if more than x people are present, unless you fork over for a "broadcast" license...

While this may not happen soonish in the public sphere due to citizens' concerns about privacy, etc. it's not out of the realm of possibility that similar efforts aren't or will not happen in the private sphere (i.e. employment centers, public and private).

And, to keep it out of the public sphere it has to be kept out of the private sphere lest people get used to the ideas and let it leak into the public sphere without protest.

The final item is (almost) already a thing: http://www.cs.iit.edu/~xli/paper/Conf/Frogeye-info14.pdf
Almost like a video camera running face recognition... which almost sound like a lot easier to do.
I agree it's definitely easier to do - and obviously already happening in this context. Also billboards that use Kinect CV to record emotional response. [1]

I was just intrigued by the perceptions around this - people often have an instinctive strongly negative response to the idea of pervasive face recognition but I'm not sure they would feel as unnerved by the presence of a wifi network with this sort of "surveillance" traffic running through it. Maybe they would.

[1] http://theconversation.com/now-advertising-billboards-can-re...

You lack sense of ethics and you are mixing up what is technologically possible to do with something that is ethical to do.

Let me give you an example: technology like glass has made possible to sit behind people homes and look inside. You can even automate it with cameras. This is not done because there is no technology to allow it but because it is felt unethical.

In addition general population ignorance in something does not mean that more qualified people can not propose measures against unethical actions of small group of individuals. These measures can be then formed into another invention called law and applied by another invention called law enforcement.

Dude, "2.4GHz dystopia", he wasn't being serious. Chill out man.
Good for him, if he was not. If true then I have to tune a little my sarcasm'o'meter.

Edit: or notice more carefully important marker. I am sorry about my comment. I was wrong.