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Shops and retailers are taking over where street cameras left off, watching shoppers' every move.
According to a 2015 survey of 150 retail executives from IT services firm Computer Services Corporation, a quarter of all British shops and 59% of fashion retailers use facial recognition software. Such technology is vital as offline stores attempt to keep up with online retailers, said Duncan Mann, chief operating officer at retail analysis firm Hoxton Analytics. "Online retailers gather all kinds of information about shoppers and physical stores also want to understand how people behave in a shop," he said. But, he admits: "A lot of these technologies are kind of invasive."
Hoxton has come up with a novel way of measuring footfall - literally by filming people's shoes. Sherlock Holmes-like, its system can deduce a remarkable amount of information such as age, gender and social class of shoppers from their footwear. "We have cameras at about 50cm off the ground and it points down so it is less invasive than facial recognition," he explains. It is surprisingly accurate. It spots the correct gender 80% of the time, better than some facial recognition technologies, according to Mr Mann.
Looks like this tech will arrive just after Amazon has put them all out of business.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday March 26 2017, @06:48AM (5 children)
I just bought a new BLU SmartPhone. I transferred the calling plan I had from a much simpler AT&T Go phone. This is the plan where one gets three months worth of service ( and 12 day's worth of calls ) for $25. Voice/texts only. No data.
Sure enough, I try to access the internet on the phone and get a message from AT&T reminding me I have no internet service with them, please contact us to add data to your plan... yada-yada-yada.
Now, here's the interesting part. I was looking at the data usage on my phone, expecting zero, as I have no data plan. About 15 days into the month, I am over 40 Megabytes. This is running in the background. Mostly Google, albeit quite a few other apps are using the connection as well. Even the NextRadio app, which came pre-installed, has chewed up 131 KB. Without ever launching the app!
This is all from things in the background. Behind my back. I have not initiated any of this.
I get the idea that these phones are leaking data like a sieve - every time they see the internet available, they phone home with their bounty. Even if you do not have internet access paid for - apparently people have agreements with AT&T to go ahead and let their apps and backdoors connect - even to those who decline "data service".
It was a let-down for me to discover the "FM Radio" my phone shipped with required internet access to run. I was of the idea that during an emergency, internet access may be spotty at best, but a standalone radio was probably a wise move for being informed after, say, an earthquake. All the phone's processing power, and even capability, is rendered useless by a few lines of code requiring permission from the internet to run. Another example of the influence of trying to monetize everything. I hold in my hand a device having several times the computational power of the mainframe system I trained on at University, yet it doesn't have the capability of a 1960's era transistor radio to pick up a radio station...
Seems such a shame that our technology and creativity is being so overrun with certain people needing to control everything.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 26 2017, @07:32AM (1 child)
Are you sure those 40 megabytes don't just consist of the data the apps tried to send, together with the response from the network with a message that internet access is not available (which the apps won't be able to interpret, of course)? I mean that you got a message about adding data to your plan shows that you did get data transfer, it's just that the connection didn't lead to the internet, but to some AT&T server.
So yes, all those applications constantly try to phone home. But your information doesn't imply that they succeed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Sunday March 26 2017, @08:06AM
Interesting.
I was looking at the SIM card setups in the phone. Its a GSM phone and has two SIM slots. I have the AT&T sim in one and a TING (T-Mobile network) SIM card in the other.
My own observations - in my location - is that AT&T is way more robust, and that T-Mobile service ( as resold by TING ) is way cheaper, but often not available. So I swap between the two according as to where I am, knowing I will pay through the nose for AT&T - but they are often the only game in town. So I pay their $25 fee every three months for backup in case I am out of T-Mobile coverage area.
The way this phone is set up, it tracks the amount of data usage as overview, AT&T and TING. On the SIM card setup, I have all data routed through AT&T, and Data Usage tab shows over 40MB of data went through AT&T, and 1.8MB went through TING.
I can account for that 1.8MB, as I did switch over to TING data last week when I had to call AAA to help me with my van ( I locked the keys in it... ), and when I called AAA, they gave me a website to go to make things go smoother. I did, via TING, and apparently they not only got my location but also gave me where the rescue truck was. Pretty clever if I say so myself.
I do note the phone always seems to know where it is ( Google Maps - Blue Dot ).
I thought it was the onboard GPS chipset this phone is alleged to have, but am told this data is calculated by the carrier, as they have multiple towers receiving my phone, and they triangulate and use beamforming techniques to determine precisely where my phone is. ( (They know exactly where their towers are, and also know that the speed of light is constant, so by looking at my signal itself - and its time of arrival to the nanosecond of when it hits each of their towers, they know pretty darn close to where I am.)
So, to get back to your suggestion, I do not really know whether that 40Megabytes its reporting is failed communication attempts or if it was actual payload delivered.
I do know that both my phone and TING report that I used 1.8MB of TING data - and that was over about 20 minutes of updating maps on my end showing me where the rescue truck was, and I am quite sure my location was sent the same way to the truck driver, as I saw the map on his display in his truck, and it looked a lot like my map, except my location was the circled dot. So I get the idea the accounting with TING was 1.8 MB of payload delivered. I would think that the accounting with AT&T would be likewise.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @07:46AM (1 child)
N900. If it works on your carrier's frequencies! They're built like bricks but they do run firefox with noscript&friends and however many tabs, and it's a physical kb. You control the apps. It's a debian fork by default or you can install whatever maemo's terminal node is right now. If you don't want the telecom radio on you can disable the hardware. If you want FM it's there, in hardware.
And for battery usage it is supreme. There's a free tool to log battery voltage and commonly important resources (ie. cpu, io, and on/off/sleep state of peripherals). Ditto a per-process resource log/viz helper to look for the culprit, when the battery voltage graph shows sharp ramps for 15sec every 5min, drawing meaningful charge overnight. Oh, I could go on...
Socially, just install an emulator and call it a game system if anyone asks. Say 'oh yeah it has a phone too I use that sometimes and the texting is pretty good for a game' and you'll look oh so avant garde with your swiss army knife game system.
I hear good things about GTA04 too, but you have to print the case for it. You could probably ask here and get a lentil to ship you that part, if you haven't access yourself. Or I guess you could practice your whittling to fine precision.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday March 26 2017, @11:45AM
The N900 was released in 2009, and they are hard to come by in good nick. Not to mention I doubt many people would be satisfied with a single core 1Ghz arm nowadays.
Was a complete knockout of a phone though, it could do things that even today, my latest Android cannot do (Especially loved the built in FM transmitter with RDS on the n900), but alas Nokia got taken over by Microsoft, and killed everything decent coming out of this area of research.
I am looking towards the http://neo900.org/ [neo900.org] project to reincarnate the N900, but at the moment it is still too expensive for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @08:33AM
"No root firewall"