• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, February 5, 2010

While certain legislators and so-called privacy wonks tie up the FTC with worry about anonymous browsing behaviors collected by cookies and ad tags, NEC Electronics Corp. reveals to the WSJ that they plan to deploy cameras to photo the faces of pedestrians who walk by their network of place-based digital ad displays in order to deduce the age, gender and aggregate audience number.

The company embeds a camera into their monitors, allowing them to constantly film people walking by. NEC takes that footage and applies a program that can automatically scan each person's face, calculating the individual's rough age and gender. While not accurate to the year, the program is fairly good at placing a person within a 10-year range.

Incredibly, an NEC official contends "that the system is designed to be anonymous." The program tracks a person's age and gender and throws out the footage, keeping only the macro data, he told the Journal, adding that no individuals are singled out.

And I believe this just like I believe that when Marisa Miller steps toward one of those new full-body airport scanners, there won't be a stampede of security guys into the screening room.

How can a picture of your face be "anonymous?" Especially if you are picking your nose or have your eyes trained on a passing set of bodacious ta' ta's? You know somewhere there are a couple of 20-year-old Japanese guys passing a joint and laughing their asses off: "Look at that guy, what happened, did he lose his dental plan?" "Oh man, lookit that one -- what is she doing with that old fart? Looking like a nooner to me ... pass the Oreos, bro."

And 10 years can be an eternity in terms of marketing targets. Does a sneeze bounce you into another age category? Does the recent application of free cosmetics samples at Bloomingdales drop you into the teen years? How about a midwinter Jamaican tan? Just how close will my close up be, Mr. DeMille? Should I worry about my hangover? How about Kaposi's sarcoma spots? Or that I am wanted in seven states for bank heists? Can I send you headshots from my portfolio so that you see my best side? Is my only opt out to wear a ski mask in August? Do I count if I walk by, but not looking at the NEC hidden cams?

I don't blame the place-based industry for wanting to provide a little more accountability to its advertisers. In one way or another, we are all working toward providing a more accurate profile of our actual audiences based on something less intrusive and more reliable than mall intercepts and diaries. But this is not an anything-goes race to the bottom.

Put a disclosure sign on each display that a camera is taking your picture right now, and NEC will have the world's finest collection of middle fingers.