Big Brother may be but much broader than we ever imagined…

Can a computer algorithm reduce the time you wait in line for your favorite burger, or improve the efficiency of trash pick up, or make it easier for criminals to target larger crowds??

A new tool being rolled out in NYC tracks people and identifies when and where groups of people are gathering, the makeup of the group, how long they have been there, and so on. It also tracks the number of people entering and leaving buildings. This information can be accessed through is internet sites like Yelp and Google. This information could potentially be used as targeting data. One potential application of these programs could be by terrorists because they provide access to large amounts of intelligence, while elimiating the need to be be physcial present at the site. For instance, Placemeter — one such program — can let you know there is a 20 minute wait at your local Starbucks, or that no more patrons are being admitted to a nightclub. If a terrorist is going to set off a remotely controlled bomb, they no longer have to have a spotter on scene to assess the size or makeup of the crowd, it is delivered right to their smartphone by Yelp.

3–2–1…

Placemeter, a New York based startup, is tracking people in an area and converting that information into exploitable digital data. The company uses a sensor that grabs video of public spaces and then converts that video to data that can be used to count people, cars ,or other objects passing by.

So Yelp says they’ll be coming around the corner in 5 seconds….

The Placemeter platform can work with an existing video camera or they can deploy a $99 sensor. “We are pretty agnostic on the sensor as long as it’s a video sensor. We sometimes use an existing security camera that nobody uses. Sometimes when we work with a transportation department they give us access to their traffic cameras. Or sometimes they just buy cheap, off the shelf IP cameras.”

In tapping public cameras, placemeter hopes to capture a “platform of data” that can be used by all sorts of applications, some for consumers, business, and even for government. “We take these video streams and make them smart — basically turn them into data”, says Placemeter’s co-founder, Alex Winter.

Realizing that public cameras are not everywhere and will not be able to provide the required video, Placemeter is paying residents up to $50 per month to place an old smart phone in their apartment that has a street view. The best views of business, pedestrians, traffic, and public space is worth more money. Residents send Placemeter information about their view and Placemeter then sends selected participants a kit to convert their unused smartphone into a sensor. Placemeter agrees to pay cash as long as the device stays on and collects data.

Is this too much data? Is this an invasion of privacy? Placemeter is ensuring that it is taking all measures to ensure anonymity. Some examples of their anonymity controls include that the smart phone sensors will not capture anything in the meter’s home, the street views are analyzed by a computer and then deleted, and that the only thing being saved is the “rough” (meta) data. This system will not detect faces, it merely identifies numbers of people. “By nature, we don’t even see faces,” says Alex Winter. “Our images are taken at a distance.”

The benefits of this system are numerous. Business investors could use this system to determine the best location for a store, retailers could learn things like sidewalk to store conversion rate, municipalities can detect the number of near misses at an intersection and generally evaluate public projects.

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Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney with the consumer watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that such a system might still violate your privacy in many ways that you do not expect. “It depends on what information they are collecting,” she explains. “They might just collect gender, but what if they can distinguish race and age? When you put those categories into a system — and you’re using multiple cameras in multiple places — you could get to a place where you can reasonably identify someone.” And like most technologies of this type, if it can be exploited by those who wish us harm, it will.