See my reply to Lurking Grue below… this could be simple cell radio triangulation for proximity tracking.
I wonder if these same tracking sensors could be a way in to hack the billboards.
This scheme uses the bug where phones don’t use a proper random MAC address when they’re checking for wifi, allowed the phones to be IDed:
Yep - that’s the major leak. Bluetooth and potentially the cellular radios are also likely vectors of exploitation. This has been going for a while now, long enough for there to be a whole industry around it targeting brick-and-mortar retailers with buzzwords like “foot traffic analytics”, “geofencing”, “1:1 marketing” and “emotional connection”. (the same retailers of course who are now desperate to find techniques to compete with AdWords, Amazon, et al and their online analytics omniscience).
Somehow find it not comforting at all that a major retail backer of one of the bigger players, is Louis Vuitton - (what with their track record and all). An aspect that isn’t mentioned in the article is that when these sensors systems are networked and if they are sufficiently dense they function as non-GPS dependent localizers which can trivially interpolate routes traveled, and of course there is no opt-out option.
I seem to recall reading, way back before the scourge of ubiquitous cellular telephones, that there were electronic billboards that could determine which radio stations the cars on the highway were tuned to, and they would use that information to select which ads to display.
I was always a little skeptical, but I considered collecting dozens of old transistor radios and tuning them all to one crazy station and placing them in giant circles around the billboards.
The iPhone (and some Android phones) already essentially do this. There was a problem with iOS 10, but it was mostly fixed and, AFAIK, trackers can know they are tracking a device from a particular manufacturer, but that’s about it.
To get around this, they will just need to come up with some reason to get users to sign on to their service, then the phone will willingly pair with radios from that service as they move around. Probably offering a 0.1% discount would be enough to get most people to sign up.
Hm, maybe. Radios mix signals with a local oscillator to get an exact intermediate frequency. If the local oscillator isn’t perfectly shielded, it’s also a transmitter that tells which frequency the radio is tuned to. (Used in WWII, I believe, to detect citizens listening to the wrong stations.)
Advertisers might have used that even before electronic signs. Knowing the demographics of your target audience along a route would be gold to them.
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Chinese people waiting for the crossing lights to change to red so they can get some star done for jaywalking?
True but at least that form factor, People have been doing this for gameboys:
At least a Software Designed Radio on the usb to handle a bunch of this.
The idea is to be a constant cloud of mac addresses and bluetooth signals to emulate a crowd.
Hollywood saw the writing on the wall.
Then the wall saw Hollywood looking at it and started hawking micro-targeted advertisements.
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I remember watching this and thinking that the eye doctor could’ve made a fortune telling customers he had a way to make those ads stop. It’s easier to ignore someone/something calling you the wrong name.
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would love this and have been floating the idea at Yale Privacy Lab workshops for approx. a year… how’d you like to work on it with us, if I can round up a couple more devs?
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That would be awesome but I realize If I take on another project right now my family will disown me.
Would be curious to see how the project goes though.
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