http://www.npr.org/sections/
A major outdoor advertising company, Clear Channel Outdoor, is planning to use their billboards to collect information from the cell phones of people passing by, so information about them can be used by advertisers to try to increase their business. The billboards have special technology and a program they call Radar. They say they will be tracking the travel patterns and behaviors of people passing by, and that they will analyze information like places that are visited by those people and the direction they are going, to make sure their billboards are placed in the best location and with ads even more closely linked to the people traveling by. This information will be shared with Clear Channel's customers, the advertisers, so that they can plan their advertising strategies more carefully and really target their customers. They say that they are being careful to protect the customers by keeping them anonymous and not individually identified but they are partners with AT&T and other companies that track consumer activities, and they will all be working together to provide lots of information to advertisers. The news article says Clear Channel says it will not be like the movie "Minority Report" where the character is walking through a shopping center and digital ads are talking to him directly and selling him what they think he would want to buy. This new program will start on thousands of billboards in 11 major cities like Los Angeles and New York starting next week. For people concerned about protecting the constitutional right to privacy, this is a creepy way that the corporation is using technology to collect more and more information about people's activities and it could lead to problems.
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