Safeguarding Privacy in the Digital Signage Industry
Center for Democracy & Technology
March 31, 2010

CDT tackles the growing use of digital signage in public places and how it can affect privacy. CDT breaks the article into three major sections:

1. A report and recommendations for digital signage;
2. An explanation of what digital signage is;
3. And standards for privacy.

CDT explains that digital signs essentially are advertisements, often called “smart screens,” that can display various ads on one sign. The signs are display monitors, LCD panels or digital billboards that loop ads and marketing toward customers or passers-by. The growing concern is technologies that can target market to specific customers or groups that may violate some personal privacy. CDT notes that the technologies consist of:

• Facial recognition: “Some systems, while not yet configured to identify individuals, can calculate a passerby’s age, gender and race, and determine how long an individual watches the display. The advertisement on the screen can then change to match the consumer’s profile. Other systems note only gender, and still others merely count the number of faces that see the screen (gaze-tracking).”
• Mobile marketing: “A rising number of DOOH [digital-out-of-home] units interact in various ways with portable devices, particularly mobile phones.”
• Social networking: “Some DOOH units provide access to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr through the Web or apps on consumers’ mobile devices.”
• Radio-frequency identification: “Some systems use RFID-enabled shelves to prompt nearby digital signage units to display advertisements related to the products on the shelves, while other DOOH systems air ads triggered by shopper loyalty cards equipped with RFID.”

CDT believes ad agencies and others using these type of technologies should be party to fair information practices. And they should provide a privacy policy that explains what type of data is collected, how it is collected and used, who it is shared with, and what rights consumers have over that data.

The full article is here, and CDT’s report on the issue is here.