日本某电器巨头公司新近研发了一种智能广告牌，能够通过面部识别技术分辨路人的性别和年龄，然后“投其所好”播放不同类型的广告内容，比如，看到女性就会播放香水广告等。据悉，这种智能广告牌目前正在日本的一些购物中心试运行，不过尚未引起太大反响，该公司还计划将其推广到国外市场。不过有隐私保护人士明确指出并不欢迎这样的技术，称没有人会喜欢被广告牌观察和分析。研发方则表示智能广告牌并不保存任何人的图像资料，只会保存对图像的分析数据，并不涉及到个人隐私。

　　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。