Any good friend notices the little things. What kind of outfit you’re rocking, what mood you are in, what age-demographic you are, how engaged you are, what kind of messaging you best respond to. Yes, a good friend is someone who notices these things, and, when you’re in a major Australian shopping centre, odds are a friend like this is there without you even knowing it.

In November 2014 the Australian advertising giant Val Morgan Outdoor, a subsidiary of the HOYTS group, quietly launched their Digital Outdoor Audience in Real Time program or DART. Advertised as an audience insights platform, DART boasts the ability to measure people’s age, gender, viewing time, engagement, and even mood across VMO’s extensive network of digital billboards.

Promotional explainer for DART

DART has grown significantly since its humble beginnings in 2014 with VMO reporting over 4 million shoppers analysed weekly in 2017, making Val Morgan Outdoor’s billboards one of the most extensive, and powerful, private biometrics network in the world. Something that VMO is quite proud of.

“So sophisticated has DART become that it is today widely accepted as the most advanced out-of-home audience measurement system in market.” — Val Morgan Outdoor, 2017

However, beyond a series of polished youtube videos and media releases peppered with buzzwords, there is little substantive understanding of DART’s capabilities. The question must be asked, how does VMO handle the images and associated data of their 4 million weekly tracks? What security exists within the DART network to prevent this tool for customer analysis being used as a surveillance network? Does the DART network face the possibility of being hijacked?

Unfortunately, these kinds of questions are left unanswered. The activities of Val Morgan Outdoor is not subject to any meaningful supervision with most legislative protections and oversight applying to government only, drafted at a time when the idea of private biometric surveillance networks existed only in movies. The age of digital real time profiling by private companies is here, yet, Australia’s regulatory landscape is non-existent. For the DART network, its scrutiny comes from within.

https://www.change.org/p/scott-morrison-ban-the-use-of-facial-recognition-enabled-billboards-in-public-spaces/u/new?source_location=petition_nav

https://www.facebook.com/VMOGTFO/

https://twitter.com/VMOGTFO