IBM's Digital Billboard Displays Individualized Ads By Reading the RFID Data in Your Wallet | Popular Science
Ads that Know You're Coming A "Minority Report"-like advertising system being developed at IBM would pick up data from RFID chips in your credit card or cell phone to discern personal details about you and your spending habits, allowing it to custom tailor a digital advertisement just for you. It might even call you by name.
Japanese company NEC wowed technophiles and horrified privacy advocates earlier this year with electronic billboards that use facial recognition technology to identify the age and gender of passers-by, tailoring the ads they display to fit the demographic. Now IBM researchers in the UK are taking that notion even further, taking advantage of new technologies to delve deeper into the personal data of people on the street, tailoring advertisements that can even call the subject by name.
The billboards they are developing rely on the RFID chips that are increasingly being built into credit cards and cell phones as a means of storing data that is accessible by contact-free sensors (like the "touch pay" feature on some credit and debit cards that doesn't require the user to swipe). A sensor on the billboard picks up on that RFID signal as the cardholder passes by, tapping information like name, age, gender, shopping habits, and personal preferences.
