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BBC News Technology

Tesco is installing face-scanning technology at its petrol stations to target advertisements to individual customers at the till. The technology, made by Lord Sugar's digital signage company Amscreen, will use a camera to identify a customer's gender and approximate age.



It will then show an advertisement tailored to that demographic.

Tesco says the screens will be rolled out across all of its 450 forecourts in the UK.

"It's like something out of Minority Report," said Amscreen's chief executive Simon Sugar, Lord Sugar's eldest son.

"But this could change the face of British retail, and our plans are to expand the screens into as many supermarkets as possible."

A Tesco spokeswoman said: "This is not new technology."

"No data or images are collected or stored and the system does not use eyeball scanners or facial-recognition technology", she added.

'Ethically deployed'

The length of someone's hair could be used to work out their gender, she said.

Privacy campaigners said companies had to tell their customers they were using the technology.

Nick Pickles, from Big Brother Watch, said: "If people were told that every time they walked into a supermarket, or a doctor's surgery or a law firm, that the CCTV camera in the corner is trying to find out who they are, I think that will have a huge impact on what buildings people go into."

Systems could only be "ethically deployed" if customers agreed to opt in to having their behaviour tracked, he added.

Philip James, joint head of technology at Pitmans law firm, argues that this technology is similar to the way social media sites tailor adverts to users based on the content of their profiles.

"The capture of facial signatures represents a potentially much greater infringement of customers' privacy in the absence of prior consent," he said.

The screens are expected to reach five million customers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24803378

BBC News

Targeted real-life adverts 'know who you are'. Targeted adverts - based on web browsing history - have become established online, but how will the public react as advertisers start to pinpoint our habits and interests in our offline life too?



Imagine walking into a shopping centre and the video screens nearby bring up footage from the newly-released box set of your favourite TV series.

As you approach a shoe store your mobile flashes a special offer for a pair of the trainers with the same brand as the ones you're about to wear out.

Then, as you walk into a coffee shop, the displays refresh to promote the giant-sized version of your favourite iced drink.

Whether you find the ideas captivating or creepy, they could soon be commonplace.

Facial recognition cameras are already being fitted to billboard screens so that advertising companies can monitor the sort of people viewing adverts at each location.

"It manages to recognise them through a number of traits," says Mike Hemmings, marketing director of Amscreen, one of the firms offering the tech.

"These traits can be things that characterise a male or a female or a person of a certain age. For instance if you are a male, it will pick up the cheekbone structure.

"It correlates it all together and then tells the advertiser and us how many people and what types of people are seeing the advert at any given time and at any given place."

The company, which is part of Lord Alan Sugar's Amshold empire. claims more than 50 million people globally see its screens each week.

In the UK, that amounts to around 3,500 screens in places like doctors' waiting rooms, railway stations, airports, petrol stations.

"Next is serving adverts in real time to people as they're standing in a queue," adds Simon Sugar, Amscreen's chief executive.

"It will also enable [subscribers] to go online to our portal to change adverts and to change them in real time, which is quite key. What we are trying to do to is replicate what's happening online in an offline world."



'Face detection'

Facial recognition is not the only idea about how to bring online personalisation into the real world.

Students at the European Institute of Technology are working on a system to link Facebook accounts to RFID (radio frequency identification) chips embedded into store loyalty cards.

The idea is that these chips could be used to flash up personalised adverts and special offers on screens when consumers visit the shops.

The team behind the Rigene project suggest when the stores are busy their software would study the the customers' various tastes and choose the ads most likely to appeal to the majority of those present.

Fashion brand Burberry is already using RFID tags in a more limited way by embedding the tech into its latest collections.

When customers wearing the clothes stand in front of "magic mirrors" in its London flagship store the screens start showing footage of how the products looked on the catwalk when modelled with other Burberry goods.

For now the firm says its system can only recognise its products and not the people wearing them.

But it adds: "It is possible that in the future we may link the RFID tags to our customer database."

It's not hard to imagine the technology being used one day to recognise the return of big spending customers and adjusting displays to suit them.

App ads

Computer chip developer Qualcomm is taking another approach.

Its Gimbal Proximity system is designed to trigger ad notifications within apps on Android and iPhone handsets when they are carried close to a shop or other organisation paying to use the technology.

It gathers data from a handset's sensors and combines it with the owner's web browsing history, app use and other saved data to build up a profile of them.

Based on their interests, its best guess at their current activity and the time of day, their handset then picks which ads to show them without needing to reveal their private data to the firms running the campaigns.

Japan was the first to roll out the tech. Qualcomm said trials suggested users were three times more likely to click on the notifications than normal non-contextualised ads.
Privacy limits

As retailers trial such tech they are well aware there is a risk of a privacy backlash.

Clothes store Nordstrom recently cancelled a scheme which tracked customers' movements through its stores using their phones' wi-fi signals after complaints.

Campaigners warn there must be limits.

"Part of the bargain with the public is that surveillance is necessary to keep us safe," says Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch.

"Now we are seeing that surveillance that is being installed in shops and in streets that was for public safety purposes is being used for advertising.

"Are we willing to accept our everyday movements being monitored and analysed, not to keep us safe but purely to allow advertisers to target us? I think people will start to say no, our privacy is worth more than a few advertising dollars."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23425297