• The New York Times, Monday, June 2, 2008 9:12 AM

Some entrepreneurs are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by -- their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at a billboard. These details are then transmitted to a central database.

The small start-ups behind the technology 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 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.

Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris, and its competitors tend to play short videos on their billboards to reach certain audiences. 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.

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