[will118]

I keep seeing these Renew people dance around this whole "identifying information" thing.

Maybe they clarified it somewhere along the line, but I read the quartz article and the one before.

I can't think of anything more identifying that I carry than my MAC address(es). So say my MAC is 01:23:45:67:89:ab and Renew anonymizes this to "0001", clearly that's just as identifiable.

I genuinely can't think of a reason to gather MAC addresses other than to use them for profiling.

The human footfall/bean counter thing is great [1], but not worth any money to anyone. Seems more like a PoC...

I don't know a lot about AI recognition but I'd have thought you could have a camera counting people fairly easily.

I actually don't personally mind, I think it's fair game unless the government says it isn't - and then I can go back to just the worry of blackhats.

So unless I'm very mistaken this Reveal/Orb company are either building profiles, plan to, or have a business plan [1] that is going nowhere big.

[1] http://www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk/images/Tally_Counter.j...

[ryusage]

It seems pretty clear from the way they talk about it that they're tracking who sees each ad on each bin in exactly the same way google tracks who sees each ad on each web page. The obvious next step for such a technology is to show specific ads only when people who might care about them are nearby. It's pretty genius really - it would put them miles ahead of other physical ad companies, at least until the rest started doing it too.

But yes, the obvious downside is that instead of worrying about google knowing everywhere you go on the internet, you now have companies that know everywhere you go physically as well.