Could YOU disappear in the digital age?

Posted by Queuebot in Science & Tech on November 23, 2009 at 10:21 am

Writer Evan Ratliff pondered the same question while writing an article for Wired magazine about people who for various reasons had tried to start over with completely new lives .  A few months later he found himself a willing volunteer to find out firsthand what the experience entailed.  With a 24 hour head start, $2000 cash stuffed in his belt and a fake office to set up in Las Vegas he drove his Honda Civic across the Bay bridge, then out of California in a bid to disappear entirely.  Leaving behind family, a girlfriend, and any semblance of a normal life for a month while assuming an entirely new identity.

The magazine periodically published clues and made accessible to their online community all the information a private investigator might be privy to, as well as placing a $5000 bounty on Evan’s head.  His travels took him across the country a few times, his disguises changed almost daily and online groups spontaneously emerged to track and document his every move.  Amateurs and professionals from coast to coast took to the chase disseminating all the details they could uncover, staking out airports and bars, even trying to glean details from acquaintances as varied as his cat sitter.

In the end it wasn’t nearly what Evan had expected when he began.





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Billboards With Cameras Bring Us One Step Closer to 'Minority Report'

Posted by David in Advertising on May 31, 2008 at 10:47 am

Advertising has always been an enterprise fraught with uncertainty. How can you know if all that money you’re paying is actually making you a return? Who’s actually even giving your advertisements a look? And are those people really paying attention? With some forms of media (e.g. on the internet), these questions are relatively easy to answer, but with other forms, like billboards, it’s still a significant gamble.

Enter billboard cameras, the type that can monitor not only how many people see a billboard, but what type of people they are too:

They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon. The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

Nothing could go wrong with this plan, right? Hit the Link and decide for yourself.

(image by flickr user simon scott)

 
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