Let’s imagine you’re shopping and you pass a digital billboard that scans you with a built-in camera. The screen seems uncannily aware of who you are — a youngish man wearing a ball cap — because it displays a sale on hockey sticks and jerseys at a nearby sports store.

Say your sister steps in front of the ad. The billboard changes. Because she’s identified as a girl, it’s now promoting makeup and nail polish.

Cool or creepy? Another scary digital intrusion into our privacy or merely the inevitable evolution of marketing?

Ads tailored to fit age and gender seem weirdly futuristic, but this week busy Oxford Street in London saw a new reality with the launch of a digital ad that only women can see.

It works like this: facial-recognition technology scans passersby and determines their gender. Women who stop can view a full 40-second ad for Plan UK, an international charity that helps children in the developing world. Men cannot view the ad but are directed to Plan’s website.

The scanner measures the distance between the viewer’s eyes, the width of the nose, the length of the jaw line and shape of cheekbones to determine gender. It’s right about 90 per cent of the time.

The $48,000 ad, which is on a two-week trial, is part of Plan’s Because I am a Girl campaign, which raises money to educate and empower the world’s poorest girls.

While men can’t watch the video, they are shown a few statistics — one in seven girls in the developing world is married before 15, or 75 million girls do not go to school. In a variation on the medium is the message, technology denies men access to the ad just as girls and women in the developing world are held back from education and other life choices.

“We are truly committed to working with men and boys, and women and girls, but on this occasion we do not show the same content for the very important reason women are being denied choices,” says Naomi Williams, Plan UK’s Campaigns Manager.

“Choices about quality of education, the right to choose when and whom to marry.”

It’s not removing men from receiving the message, she adds. “It’s actually making them think and engage.”

It’s the first time facial-recognition technology and interactive capability has been used in Britain for advertising. In the United States, The Venetian resort and hotel in Las Vegas uses scanning technology to tailor restaurant and club recommendations to passersby. With technology developed by Intel, some Adidas stores are using facial recognition in “virtual footwear walls” to display products suited to a shopper’s age and gender.

Immersive Labs in New York has pilot projects that will be launched in Canada next month, says executive vice-president Jill Miller, declining further details. The company offers “anonymous video analytics” on pedestrians, including measurements of how long they are actually looking at an ad.

Williams says the response has been positive to the Plan UK campaign, and has doubled the number of Twitter followers in just a few days. A piece about the billboard was the most-read article on BBC online on Tuesday, and press inquiries have come from around the world, including Brazil, Portugal and Korea.

While privacy advocates in Britain have described the ad as “creepy,” Plan UK and Clear Channel UK, the agency that specializes in outdoor media, say the ad does not store any data and that passersby have a choice to opt in before facial features are scanned.

While this ad allows viewers the choice of interacting, not all commercial applications of facial-recognition software may allow that choice. “There is a Big Brother fear we have that the machine is watching us and recognizing our gender and age,” says Sergio Meza, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto. But scanning for age and gender is harmless, he contends. “We are not used to that, but from a rational point of view you know it’s not creepy. When you go to a store, a salesperson has measured you — your age, gender and your purchasing power, just by looking at you. You don’t have a problem with that because that person is human. But they are reading you.”

Plan UK’s use of facial recognition software is creative and provocative by using different content for men and women to send a political message, says Teresa Scassa, Canada research chair in information law at the University of Ottawa. She sees it as “the edge of a big wave” of broad social issues that will be addressed in the near future.

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But she worries about digital technology accumulating and layering personal information on top of a database of recognizable images. “The problem is the loss of control over our personal information,” she says. “It happens in so many contexts and is applied and matched behind the scenes, so it’s difficult to know as individuals what companies know about us.”

There is also potential for discrimination,” Scassa says. Someone identified as a young, affluent professional may be targeted for special discounts and promotions. Someone else, who shows up as a less desirable customer, may not get those same offers.

“You open the possibility of targeting products and services to classes of individuals while others will be excluded from opportunities. There is the risk of social alienation, profiling done by algorithms, it’s not perfect but it’s making a judgment of who you are and what you like.”