Awhile back I wrote about Video Mining and the ability to put a camera with a Digital Sign and actually see how many people looked at the screen at a given moment. You can even read things like: age, gender and soon ethnicity.
The New York Times just published an article about this technology and being the putzes they are...didn't do their research and gave a truly negative feel to the technology.
Dave Haynes at sixteen:nine gave a pretty good summary of it...here's a tidbit:
Maybe I’m naive, but the whole fuss that seems to be bubbling up about face tracking technology for digital billboards and screens has that much ado about nothing feel to it.
As an old newspaper editor I have too many times been in planning meetings that ended up with reporters being sent out to find people who were upset with something, often people who weren’t terribly well informed or who had all of 10 seconds to develop an opinion.
Now the New York Times has smarter people than the papers I worked for — they hired me, so they were obviously damaged souls — but they nonetheless sent out a reporter and did a piece that really reaches to drum up a fuss.
Read the rest of his post here.
