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Sales Surveillance: Rise of the Bionic Mannequin
This holiday season, if you catch yourself shopping in some upscale establishments chances are you won’t be alone, even if the store was completely empty.
An new fashion mannequin know as the EyeSee made by the Italian company Almax SpA has been outfitted with eyeball cameras allowing it to track age, race and gender of customers through advanced facial recognition software. This hardware/software combo can be used to track would-be shoplifters in greater detail than the traditional cameras mounted on the ceiling. However, right now owners of these high-tech dolls have turned them into powerful marketing tools. They are using the data each mannequin gathers to better tailor the shopping experience in a way similar to Amazon or Google uses cookies to track your purchases and show you similar products your more likely to purchase down the road.
Creepy right? I think so too but it’s something we should all be used to at this point given the Terms of Service’s agreements we agree to on sites like Amazon, Facebook, Google and the like. However, the difference here is that we don’t have a choice once we’ve entered a store. It’s a little intimidating to think that we are not far from living the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is walking through a hallway being called out to by the ads or at the Gap where his identity is mistaken for Mr. Yakamoto.
How long before our every move is being tracked on- and off-line?
Read the full article over at Motherboard