Car-Mounted Ads Take a New Direction: Data Collection

VIA: Citylab

Atop most New York City taxis are advertising screens—flashing LEDs hawking Lion King tickets and beer and McDonald’s. Along with the vehicles’ yellow hue, the rooftop ads once set traditional cabs apart from the Ubers and Lyfts with whom they share city streets. Rather than waste all that monetizable airspace, though, a venture-backed startup called Firefly started installing portable advertising billboards on the roofs of ride-hailing vehicles in five major cities across the country. More [HERE]

‘THEY LIVE / YOU WILL’

My colleague Bill Posters wrote an incredibly important essay outlining the main points of interest for the anti advertising, pro civic media movement. Please read it!

His writing shows us that while the out of home advertising industry acted as the fuel for neoliberal capitalism and helped sustain the post war growth of American consumerism, we have entered a new epoch that makes the incantations of billboards and bus shelters look quaint in comparison. Dataism and the rise of behavioral data collection, because of its accuracy and pervasiveness, threatens more than the sanctity of our shared public public spaces, but will likely influence fundamental aspects of our collective social behavior in ways that will drastically alter society as we evolve into the future. It's fucking scary. What happens when the data exhaust you produce is so granular that Spotify can accurately predict when you are in a bad mood? And what then when Spotify realizes that your consumption drops in those moments of aggression and actively makes decisions to prevent that behavior from diminishing your capacity as a consumer? Now extend that type of influence over all networks and all devices and you see a human being pushed and pulled in ways that it cannot see, and cannot control, all to increase ones predictability as consumer, and you start to see how over a few hundred years the nature of society is fundamentally changed as people become more and more tuned by the needs of those in control of the data we collectively produce. Like a meteor on a collision course with earth, you don't change a society by blowing it up, you send out a small satellite to slowly push the course of its direction over many years and watch as the final destination finds itself far of course. In one case we all sign in relief, in the other we loose our free will to the corporate entities that control the data of our lives. 

Nada, played by Roddy Piper, picks up a pair of black-rimmed glasses and puts them on, but these are no ordinary glasses, these glasses are X-Ray specs. Immediately they détourne all forms of corporate propaganda that he casts his gaze at—the billboard advertisements, magazines, and television programmes all change. All are subverted to reveal an alternative truth (in essence), making the invisible visible, revealing in the process the hidden infrastructures, architectures and power relationships that exist between corporate and state level actors—in the case of They Live aliens, and their subjects—citizens of the US. Everyone is asleep, Nada is awake.
More [HERE]

FaceApp Shows We Care About Privacy but Don’t Understand It

I have been posting a lot of articles on data privacy because it related directly to my interest in outdoor advertising and the influence industry as a whole. While advertising and OOH advertising more specifically tried to greet you where you were in an effort to capture your attention and influence the trajectory of your thoughts, your digital data exhaust is being used to predict in more accurate ways than you can imagine, your emotional and psychological profile at any given moment in an effort to serve that influence to you on a device you have already given your undivided attention. The goal, like advertising is not mind control, but the subtle nudge of outcomes. Don't demand a society that bows to consumer culture and finds itself so deep in the forest of capitalism that we cannot see our way out, but rather slowly push us there over generations by making each moment of each individuals life more likely to involve a consumer interaction. With enough data, this doesn't become a hypothetical but an inevitable outcome of a society that has allowed our daily lives to be subtly influenced by the needs of capital over the needs of our society. 

VIA: NY Times

FaceApp, a mobile face-editing application, has all the necessary components for a viral privacy scandal: a catchy concept, celebrity users, a mysterious company and a stampede of public interest.

Here’s the rundown of FaceApp’s 15 minutes of fame: A viral app lets us see what we might look like as a wrinkle-laden 75-year-old. Users click “yes” on the terms of service without looking, and start snapping and uploading pictures. More [HERE]

Opinion | I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.

While I love this project and it's goals,  redirect ads are still redirect ads that dupe you into seeing content you weren't looking for, placed there by someone who paid to influence your opinion. It may seem like a callous thing to say but I'd prefer we keep people from pursuing extremist lives by nurturing our citizenry with racial equality, economic fairness, and social justice that creates a sense that we are all in this together. I think the fair distribution of the immense wealth created by the human project would go a long way to combatting outsiderness. I believe it would inevitably come with racial and social justice as distribution would require us to face inequality. Some say that the competition which capitalism creates is what fuels our creative impulse and pushes society forward. The ingenious of humanity tied to the need to work harder and beat out your fellow man. I think that logic is a not so veiled attempt to hide the greed that undermines our social contract in its current form. While I am all for redirecting the suicidal to prevention, or extremist behavior towards the true costs of such pursuits, I wish we didn't have to do it by paying to manipulate the populous, because most manipulations just aren't that altruistic. 

VIA: The NY Times

Kevin Hines had one thought as he plummeted toward the Pacific Ocean: I can change anything in my life except the fact that I just jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
More [HERE]

Selling Your Private Information Is a Terrible Idea

As the tools of manipulation become more heavily driven by the data we create through our online, social, and physical interaction with the digitized world, its incumbent on us all to think about not only our ownership of that data, but how inalienable it is to our own being.

VIA: The NY Times

“Claim Your 31st Right,” declares the #My31 app’s splash screen. “Review, share, and confirm your HUMAN right to your data as your property.”
More [HERE]