Late to the party but thanks for posting this, really interesting article. I think we are likely to find ourselves in a situation where govt comes under intense pressure by corporate lobbying over this.
I wonder how this type of data gathering sits with the privacy act.
If you don't know that someone has data on you, how are you able to exercise your rights under the privacy act 2020?
Right to Access Personal Information:
- Individuals have the right to request access to any personal information that an agency holds about them. The agency must provide this information within a reasonable timeframe, typically within 20 working days.
- The information must be provided in a way that is understandable, and individuals can ask for a copy of the information.
Right to Request Deletion (Right to Erasure):
- Although not as extensive as the "right to be forgotten" in some jurisdictions, individuals in New Zealand can request that their personal information be deleted if it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected, or if it is being held unlawfully.
- Agencies are generally required to comply with such requests unless there is a lawful reason to retain the information
In the context of The Privacy Act 2020, an "agency" is (relevant parts)
Private Sector Organizations:
- Companies, businesses, and non-profit organizations that collect, use, or store personal information.
Note: this is me querying ChatGPT about the privacy act, I'm not a privacy act expert.
Also not an expert. I think it only applies if you store the info.
I'd guess number plates may not considered personally identifiable information, or they might be in general but it would be easy enough to hash them to avoid storing this info. You'd still get the info on how often certain plates come up.
Smart screens guessing your emotion wouldn't need to store this info. Once you stopped interacting the info isn't useful and can be discarded.
The ads at Wellington Station with the cameras might just be working out how many people read them.
It really depends on how they are using it the info. It seems most of the time you could have the device get an answer (is this person looking at me? How are they feeling? How often does this vehicle drive past) without having to store personally identifiable information.
Maybe true, but the issue here is that you don't know who / what the companies are, if they are gathering the data to store.
According to ChatGPT:
Why a License Plate is Considered PII:
- Identifiability:
A license plate is a unique identifier associated with a specific vehicle. While the license plate itself may not directly identify an individual, it can often be linked to the owner of the vehicle through registration records. If an organization has access to those records or the ability to link the plate to an individual, the license plate becomes personally identifiable information.
So a license plate could be considered PII, so it would be contingent on if they were storing the data.
The Privacy Commissioner has equally ambiguous information.
It says that a license plate itself isn't but the owners details are.
But you can use the plate to look up the owner so why wouldn't the plate be considered PII?
This is a grey area, which shouldn't be. Most license plates are registered to individuals, which means that most license plates are a form of PII.
Why do billboards need number plate recognition? If they want to count eyeballs, would it not be enough to count vehicles?
I have a similar question about why a mall smart screen needs to know your mood.
The reason is always the same - we need to sell MORE stuff to you
But how does it help?
Are they just checking for duplulicates to identify people who commute regularly?
What does the smart screen in the mall change to sell you more stuff depending on your mood?
TL;DR: marketing departments are being up sold this crap by advertising vendors.
Haha that makes sense. It's something that makes the billboard company stand out in a sea of options, regardless of it it's actually helpful for converting sales.
Google algorithms pounce on vulnerable people, billboards could do the same.
Not looking forward to the dystopia where one minute I'm admiring a picturesque landscape in a New Caledonia holiday ad and the next minute it sees me and hastily changes to an ad for cheap chocolate from The Warehouse.
π oh boy, it's coming, isn't it?
Occasionally I'm in central Wellington and almost feel obligated to read the billboards. I am not sure how else a company is supposed to advertise to me. I use an ad blocked at home and at work, I have a pi-hole doing network-level ad blocking to cover my phone (as well as an onboard one for when I'm out and about). I don't listen to the radio. I don't watch broadcast TV, and hardly watch TV in general so can't even get product placement. Don't use Reddit anymore so no astroturfing.
Billboards are about the only way they can get me! Then it's all Spark or power companies and a fat lot of good that does, if I'm going to choose a phone, internet, or power provider I'm gonna research the hell out of it on the internet, and I have no issues choosing someone I've never heard of since it's all a commodity, one is the same as the next if it's the same specs.
Maybe if (when) your vision becomes a reality, I'll be able to get some relevant billboard ads. Though I'm not sure where they will get my data to make the ads relevant. Other billboards watching me?
Pretty sure Philip K Dick predicted it in the 60s but I can't remember which book or story. I sometimes worry that we make things because he predicted them, but I do like the homeopapes.
Yeah I'm in a similar boat, I don't watch broadcast tv or listen to the radio unless someone makes me, I have ad blockers and tracker blockers, my loyalty cards are all signed up to an alias and its alias phone.
Now that we don't have a cat to spoil, I don't think I'm anyone's preferred target market though, except maybe some low level grifters!
I guess in the absence of data it will default to what advertising always defaults to, i.e penis enlargement.
I'm sure homeopapes are something we have. Perhaps you could call a social media feed something like that, though that's more read what we tell you. Reddit/Lemmy? Where you subscribe to communities based on interest and get a feed of items of interest to you?
Or maybe RSS feeds are more in line with the idea? One way or another, I've sure homeopapes pretty much exist.
and its alias phone
Ooh what do you mean by this? I use randomised email aliases for pretty much anything I sign up for, but I haven't found a way to avoid giving my real phone number when it's mandatory.
I guess in the absence of data it will default to what advertising always defaults to, i.e penis enlargement.
Hopefully we will soon have glasses you can buy that use AI to block out adds within our vision, using generative AI to fill in the gaps like a real time photoshop.
Homeopapes are definitely a thing. News agreggators, RSS feeds and customizable news like Reuters, and things like pocket being able to send to ereaders.
Alias phone is not some exciting tech unfortunately. I just have another phone that has a number and email account of its own that get used for signups. It's on casual prepay and is associated with its own human name and online accounts. It's kind of like I have an invisible flatmate who likes things like fuel cards and free streaming services.
Hopefully we will soon have glasses you can buy that use AI to block out adds within our vision
If we get that I want the They Live plugin!!
Alias phone is not some exciting tech unfortunately. I just have another phone that has a number and email account of its own that get used for signups.
Ah bummer. I use a separate randomized email address when I sign up for things, all forwarded to my main email that stays hidden. But then I go and buy some coffee online, and check my Facebook settings and see the coffee place told Facebook I bouught coffee. How does it know? I have all the blockers in the world, Facebook shouldn't have known I was there. Then I look at the Facebook record and see that it says they send Facebook the data through Facebook Business tools.
But how do they match it up? My best guess is phone number. I would prefer that I could use random phone numbers for each service that forward texts to my real number, like I have for email.
If we get that I want the They Live plugin!!
Haha oh man, might be better not knowing.
Yikes, that's creepy about facebook. I'm not on there much but I remember google once wanted to include something I'd booked in my google calendar (whatever the hell that is) so I never booked through that system again. I hate to think what fb is doing that I can't see, apparently it even has profiles on people who don't have accounts with it.
I wish it were easier to avoid this stuff.
It's scary how easy it is to track people. They definitely have profiles on people who don't have accounts. In fact, with the data that whichever coffee place uploaded that let them identify me, facebook has an option that lets you unlink the data. Not delete it. They keep the data and anonymise it so they no longer fall under privacy rules.
What worries me most about non transparency of data is their politics and what is happening to people in conflict zones.
I don't follow Facebook news. What is happening to people in conflict zones?
Meta has been heavily implicated in a couple of genocides - the A Death Sentence For My Father report gets its title from a heartbreaking example where this doctor who didn't even have a Facebook account was killed because of it.
But that was passive i.e Meta deliberately ignoring reports and refusing to take genocidal content down. More recently Meta has more actively chosen to "take sides" re the widespread censorship of Palestinian human rights posts.
I worry that this attitude combined with its surveillance powers is probably having a catastrophic effect. It would not surprise me at all to learn Meta is data sharing with war AI (which is already being alleged re Whatsapp).
That's terrible. We are in this age where technology is advancing faster than regulation, and I hope we sort it out over the next few decades as it will get exponentially worse the longer we make reactive rules.
I agree, but I really hope some of us are at least in a position to sort it out. There's this concept Surveillance Capitalism that points out how corporations have become more powerful because of it and their interactions with governments.
Even without that, in the US they have had legislative capture for decades (eg they are not allowed easy online taxes like we have because HR Block and TurboTax lobby against it) and NZ is beginning to show signs of it. Peter Thiel owns a surveillance company that develops war AI.
That said historically there are always swings in favour of human rights every now and again so here's hoping we as a species see sense.
The IRS recently released free filing so people don't have to go through a company! They aren't doing automatic assessments like us but are at least making progress on that front.
With the whole surveillance capitalism thing, there's a massive push among the kind of people who hang out on Lemmy to get away from big tech. Once the alternatives are polished enough I think we'll see migration of people to new platforms. Personally I have extended family who would be happy to get off Facebook but there is no alternative I can seriously suggest. A federated Facebook alternative Friendica exists, but there is no way it could be a replacement. You can't even post a video in a seamless way, your best option is to upload to YouTube which is way too many steps for the average person.
There are some alternative companies making great progress but there's a long way to go.
That's huge for them on the tax front!
I really love how our IRD now gets bank data.
I've found it impossible to even get my family off Whats App, let alone facebook. When I first opened my facebook account the only people I could add were my online American friends because no one here seemed to have heard of it. So I guess I was part of the problem. Am trying to spread awareness of the Fediverse so hopefully that will balance out my karma!
I think you're right, so many of us do aspire to get away from social media surveillance and we will eventually have an ecosystem. Thank you for your part in it!π
When I first opened my facebook account the only people I could add were my online American friends because no one here seemed to have heard of it. So I guess I was part of the problem. Am trying to spread awareness of the Fediverse so hopefully that will balance out my karma!
I was mostly the same with Facebook. Everyone was on... I think Bebo. And I had some friends who had moved overseas invite me to Facebook. This was when it was students only, though I'm pretty sure it was only a matter of months after I joined before it was public for anyone to join.
I think youβre right, so many of us do aspire to get away from social media surveillance and we will eventually have an ecosystem. Thank you for your part in it!π
My part in it is on one hand running an instance, and on the other hand never mentioning it to anyone IRL π
Not sure if I've previously mentioned it but I'm reading Mindf*ck at the moment (the book on social media and election manipulation, not the murder romance series). It's a book by the whistleblower of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And it's pretty messed up.
Knowing where you are and how you feel is just adding more layers to the ad pitch.
God knows if it works, but they sell the data and entities buy them, perhaps less important to utilize it all together than getting people used to constant surveillance and slowly building profiles and monitoring how to influence them.
I'm reading Mindf*ck at the moment, the book by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, and it's pretty eye opening.
Basically using big data to identify a small number of people you can manipulate to change the outcome of elections. Billboard data surely feeds into that, if you can identify individuals from it (which you might not be able to today, but as you say, getting people comfortable with surveillance will allow more invasive iterations of the technology).
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