I have a fascinated/disgusted relationship with targeted advertisements. On one hand, I’ve seen enough Playtex commercials in my lifetime that I could probably draw you their logo from memory, and I’ve never been in the position to decide, “should I buy the Playtex version, or a different brand?” All those ads in my face have been a complete waste of my time, and the advertiser’s dollars. So, I think it would be really neat if I only saw advertisements that would interest me.
On the other hand, even though I’m blessed with A.D.D. and therefore daydream my way through most ads, I’ve read enough studies about how ads work, and I know that in some cases I’m more likely to buy a brand I’ve heard of. In other cases, a simple Google search will suffice, and the recommendation from people I trust is worth more than a hundred well-produced ads.
Since the seminal work on the subject—Minority Report—came out in theaters, I’ve been waiting to see just how close we’ll get to individually-targeted ads. And this morning I see that Germany is beginning to place video cameras inside of street-level billboards, designed to recognize people’s emotional reaction to specific ads. If the advertisers sees that more people are smiling, or at least interested, than sneering, they’ll feel encouraged to keep the ad going.
Granted, this is quite far from a commercial that speaks to you or knows your habits, as in “Hey, Bill Braskey, it’s been 8 days since your last vanilla latté. Don’t you think you deserve one?” And I’m thankful for that. At present, I don’t feel like an advertisement that judges my emotional state is an invasion of privacy, but if they start to recognize my identity, I certainly will.
We do, however, already see ads based on our habits. Google and its advertising partners have the ability to show you ads that other visitors won’t see, because your Internet browsing habits are not exactly private. They call it “interest-based advertising”, and because Google is Google, they were very open and up-front about it, and have provided permanent methods for anybody to opt-out of the program.
Billboards shouting out your name aren’t a reality yet for a couple important reasons: 1) recognizing an individual face isn’t foolproof yet, and 2) advertisers don’t have access to a database of, say, driver’s license photos. Although, there may be a way around that last requirement, if Facebook starts selling access to names tagged in photos. In any event, you can rest assured that we’ll keep on top of this for you and help you protect your brain.
Summertime is traditionally when most people take their annual vacations, and since the social media explosion, more aspects of a given person’s vacation will end up as photos on Flickr, or “wish you were here” messages on Facebook.
“We had mentioned that we were going out of town for an extended period and even Twittered about the trip as we drove for three days,” he told an Arizona television station. While he was gone, video editing equipment was stolen from his home.
The Subtleties
My first reaction was to assume that the man in the story has some people following him on Twitter who aren’t exactly friendly. But then I remembered that anybody can do a search on Twitter for a phrase like “vacation” and find results like these:
Then, if you can cross-reference a likely victim with their address found online, and you have criminal tendencies, then you know which house to burglarize.
Additionally, many Twitter apps (and possibly for other services) have the option of finding your current location and looking nearby for specific criteria.
The Solution(s)
Take an inventory of which of your information can be found online easily. Some starting points:
Is your username the same as your real name?
Are you and your address listed in the phone book?
Does your wireless router know where it’s located? Does it broadcast that location?
Is your profile public? Do you want to keep it that way?
Are you on LinkedIn? How much of that profile is public?
and so on…
You may decide that a simple solution would be to keep the vacation secret until you get home, but remember, even if you decide to avoid the magic word “vacation” in your own online updates, your friends may inadvertently be helping potential burglars:
Håkan Djuphammar, VP of Systems Architecture for Ericsson, made a prediction recently that all new mobile phones sold after Summer 2010 would have two-way RFID chips in them that would allow them to act as a tag or a reader.
If what you just read sounds like technobabble, watch this short news excerpt to get up to speed. Even if you’re not interested in technology, you should learn about the possibilities and the dangers of RFID:
Back to the mobile phone: yes, it would be perfectly easy for all mobile phones on the planet to have an RFID tag/scanner in them. The possibilities for making use of RFID, like the numbering scheme itself, are practically endless. People in Asia use their mobile phones to buy drinks from vending machines all the time, and according to Djuphammar:
the chip might also be used by credit card companies to track the location of cardholders to cut down on fraud.
So, the myriad of privacy concerns aside, does this mean I won’t be able to use my credit card if I leave my phone at home?
RFID doesn’t inherently scare me. I already use one in the keyfob for my car when unlocking the door and starting the engine. It raises ethical concerns, and I think we should plan our next moves carefully. We don’t have a great history of moving carefully forward (people still drive without seatbelts all the time), which is one of the reasons I’m hoping you’ll educate yourself and your friends about this starting today.
If you have the means and the time, I highly recommend the book Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing, which not only details many possibilities for taking advantage of RFID, it also contains a great starting point for a positively ethical “post-PC” future (including some really neat new icons).
Most of the time when you hear the term “facial recognition,” it’s used by people trying to attract you to a new digital camera, or software, or a plugin for Facebook.
On an individual level, it’s little more than a way to help your camera focus, or group and search your photos. But if you’re using it on a larger group level, you can make it do all sorts of nifty, and possibly dangerous, things.
Airports are trying to use it to catch suspicious people when they appear in huge crowds. It shouldn’t shock you if I say that airports detain many people every week for doing nothing wrong. I’m a little worried that this would lead to even more false alarms.
YouTube has got a way to detect celebrity faces in their videos, which can help them, among other things, find videos that are breaking copyright law. There’s no reason, however, that it can’t also learn your face, and find you in other videos it has indexed.
Convenience
Some Windows-only laptops are using it to bypass the need for a startup password. I’m eagerly looking forward to the day when it might replace all my passwords, but there are a few kinks to work out first: most importantly, the Internet is not particularly secure, and I wouldn’t want just anybody to be able to activate my computer’s camera and look around. It’d have to be more of a system where, say, the bank’s Web site asks the local machine, “are you sure it’s really him?” and my computer replies Yes or No.
But if we could get that to work, I’d be a much happier man. I sit down, I’m logged in. I walk away, I’m logged out. Instantaneous, foolproof (?) security.
Toshiba has found a way to make changing the radio station in your car as easy as blinking your eye.
That had better not be the trigger for changing the music. We, as a people, do a lot of blinking.
Beyond the Face
Microsoft is wanting to combine face recognition with voice recognition and movement tracking (and maybe more) with their new Project Natal. I am so far a big fan of the XBox experience, even if Windows drives me batty, so I have high hopes for this. I can’t help but think that background noises, like a dog barking, will cause a significant amount of trouble.
Conclusion
My American dream relies heavily on the notion of being able to go through an entire work week without anything in my pockets, or hanging off my belt. If facial recognition can be proven to be more than, say, 99% effective, sign me up.
But it also depends on a lot of trust in the authorities we place in power. I’ve seen corrupt behavior. You probably have, too. Do you imagine these technologies will help or hurt?
Every Tuesday, Smithee presents an article about his own experiences with credit cards and observations about the credit card industry.
A few weeks ago I was the victim of debit card fraud. In my case the system worked very well. The bank’s automatic mechanisms noticed a few big-ticket items being purchased in Chicago, which is quite far from where I live. The first one went through, the second one was held up and I started getting calls from the bank’s fraud detection department.
So, that card number had to be canceled and I got a replacement with a new number within a few days. The money was also refunded, but the surprise came when I noticed the new card had that little “PayPass” logo on it. You know, the thing that’s supposed to let you tap the card against a reader instead of sliding it through the reader? (Think of the time saved!) The old one didn’t have PayPass on it, and I was ambivalent about the technology, having read reports about how it’s not all that much faster.
The bigger problem is that it uses RFID, which is not exactly ready for prime time. To make a long story short, people can easily, and cheaply, extract the data from your card without you knowing. Here’s a video with a demonstration:
Interesting side note: Mythbusters was going to do a show about this, before the idea was quashed.
I mentioned last week that my Citibank credit card was suspended and the issuer supplied me with a new credit card number. At the time, I assumed that this was due to my recent traveling, which might have raised red flags in Citibank’s fraud detection algorithms. A number of visitors suggested calling your credit card in advance of any travel to warn that charges from another area should be considered legitimate.
That is excellent advice, and I should remember to do that in the future. However, it wouldn’t have helped in this case. I was able to get a little more information out of Citibank. It seems that a merchant experienced a security breach jeopardizing the privacy of a customer database. They wouldn’t say which merchant was affected, but they solved the problem by issuing new card numbers to all members.
After I received and activiated my new card, I was able to view my transactions online. I was happy to see that my credit card number had not been used by anyone other than myself. I’ve only started the process of contacting utilities and other services which automatically bill my credit card each month. So far, the process of updating my account has been smooth thanks to the ability to perform most of this maintenance via the web.
I know people who are still nervous about online banking, particularly with banks that have no major offline presence. Part of me wants them to embrace the future in which we live and get with the times. However, I understand it’s a slow and cautious process for many people, especially when there’s a level of comfortability with visiting a branch and seeing the same people you’ve known for years.
When a bank fails and liquidates it assets, it’s big news. NetBank filed for bankruptcy last month with $2.5 billion in assets and $2.3 billion in deposits (liabilities). From the reports I’ve seen since then, customers barely felt a thing. There have been some complaints, but mainly from people who held over $100,000 at the bank.
No one should have more than $100,000 at the same bank. If you need to keep that much cash around, diversify into other banks. The FDIC, the organization that insures deposits — they will cover your funds if a bank collapses — limits their protection to $100,000 per social security number per bank. If you have a joint account, you can get away with another $100,000 in that account. But for most purposes, if you need to keep more than that in accessible liquid accounts, open up an account at a new account for each $100,000 you have.
Another option is to put money in CDs with the same bank, but again, this also should be limited to $100,000. Most of the people who have not been able to access their money quickly after NetBank’s collapse had more than $100,000 deposited in the same account.
NetBank wasn’t the only bank to fail.
The year’s first bank failure came in February with Metropolitan Savings Bank of Pittsburgh, a small bank with just $15.8 million in assets. It was notable, though, because it was the first bank to go under since June 25, 2004. That was the longest streak without a bank failure since the FDIC was created in 1933.
The year’s second failure came in September when NetBank, an Internet bank based in Alpharetta, Ga., was closed by federal regulators. Depositors of the $2.5 billion-asset bank were assumed by ING Bank. NetBank had about $109 million in uninsured deposits. NetBank was the largest failure in 14 years.
The third failure occurred in early October at Miami Valley Bank of Lakeview, Ohio, an $86.7 million bank (Three bank failures spur concerns, Reuters).
I must note that two of those three banks were typical brick-and-mortar institutions. Online banks are as safe as banks with branches, as long as you see the FDIC symbol. If you still don’t trust the bank’s website, search for the bank on FDIC’s Institution Search website.
Password security is another issue, but I still believe that online security is more stringent than human behavior in person. While people trust restaurant waiters to disappear for several minutes at a time with our credit card, some are still shaky about typing the credit card number into an web form that submits information with 128-bit (very strong) encryption. When you hear of laptops with customer information disappearing or falling into the wrong hands, that has little to do with online vs. offline activity.
Last Friday, the first portion of my latest interview with the Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing E-Report was published for podcast listeners. Today, the second half of my rambling was broadcast, this time about finding deals online.
Here are the time stamps relevant to the interview.
07:10 E-Report introduction 07:25 Best place to find deals online (mentioned SlickDeals, DealTaker, CNet (CNET), Froogle (GOOG) and Mallicious) 10:10 Is eBay (EBAY) worth the risk? 12:35 How to control your spending during the holidays 14:34 Coordinating a complete gift experience 15:30 Incorporating charity into gift giving
Listen to this latest podcast by visiting the Wall Street Journal podcast page. Look for the Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing, and this particular episode will be featured all weekend. An alternate option is to dial 800-975-3916 and listen to the podcast over the phone. Or you can do what I have done: subscribe to the Tech News Briefing RSS feed.
LeanLifeCoach: In the end how much will the IRS really get; 10% maybe 20% of all this money? And how much will we spend collectively in actual dollars and... on Enforcing Tax Laws Works. Go Figure.
Jim: Would better IRS enforcement make a big dent? No. Even if the IRS was perfect in enforcing law and collecting all debts it would probably not increase... on Enforcing Tax Laws Works. Go Figure.
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Since the seminal work on the subject—Minority Report—came out in theaters, I’ve been waiting to see just how close we’ll get to individually-targeted ads. And this morning I see that Germany is beginning to place video cameras inside of street-level billboards, designed to recognize people’s emotional reaction to specific ads. If the advertisers sees that more people are smiling, or at least interested, than sneering, they’ll feel encouraged to keep the ad going.
