日本某電器巨頭公司新近研發了一種智能廣告牌，能夠通過面部識別技術分辨路人的性別和年齡，然后“投其所好”播放不同類型的廣告內容，比如，看到女性就會播放香水廣告等。據悉，這種智能廣告牌目前正在日本的一些購物中心試運行，不過尚未引起太大反響，該公司還計劃將其推廣到國外市場。不過有隱私保護人士明確指出并不歡迎這樣的技術，稱沒有人會喜歡被廣告牌觀察和分析。研發方則表示智能廣告牌并不保存任何人的圖像資料，只會保存對圖像的分析數據，并不涉及到個人隱私。

A virtual mannequin appearing in the digital billboards.

In Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film Minority Report, an interactive ad shouts to Tom Cruise's character "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness!" – having identified him by scanning his iris. In Japan, sci-fi prophecy is now becoming reality, with the first digital billboards tailored to passing shoppers tried out in malls.

Produced by the electronics giant NEC, the ad signage uses facial recognition software and can identify the shopper's gender (with 85-90% accuracy), ethnicity and approximate age. With obvious attractions for marketers, they can then be targeted with ads for appropriate products – perfumes for women, for example.

Still in the future for now are individual-specific ads as in Minority Report, but the potential is there for the software to measure the distance between features – a distinctive aspect of our face that does not change with disguises or even surgery – and then find a match on a database in less than a second. The ad panels have so far caused little concern in Japan, where there is less sensitivity to big business keeping tabs on citizens; but NEC now plans to introduce them abroad, and western consumers may be more resistant.

"We don't expect the billboard to look back at us, but that is exactly what is happening now," says Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), a Washington DC-based research centre that aims to protect privacy. "Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us, and once these practices are commonplace it will be hard to reverse them."

But NEC insists there is little to fear: "As our system does not store any images – it stores only the analysed results [viewers' age and sex] based on those images – we feel there is no privacy issue."

Along with Blade Runner-style 3D ads, Tokyo now also boasts a camera-equipped vending machine that suggests drinks to consumers according to their age and gender. Weather conditions and the temperature are taken into account too.

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(Agencies)

（中國日報網英語點津 Helen 編輯）