Yahoo is developing personalized out-of-home advertising technology

Yahoo appears to have plans to personalize banners and billboards placed in the open air. For this, the company wants to use various sensors, including image recognition and biometric data.

The technology that Yahoo has invented is written in a patent application that was filed last year with the American patent office USPTO, Ars Technica, among others, discovered. The application was only recently made public. Titled “measuring user engagement with smart billboards,” Yahoo describes a technology to make outdoor advertising banners smarter.

Using various sensors, a billboard could gather information from people in its vicinity. By collecting information using facial or image recognition cameras, location data, motion sensors, or even biometric data such as iris scanners or fingerprint scanners, the system could build a profile of the audience. Based on that data, the billboard then determines which advertisement is most relevant to the group.

In the patent application, Yahoo gives the example of a busy highway. Sensors measure the number of cars, the average speed and use this information in combination with what time and day of the week it is. Image recognition software can be used to recognize the type of car passing by, which says something about the driver’s socio-economic background. Yahoo could then create a profile based on the aggregated data of all passing cars and serve the most appropriate advertisements.

The system, with its many possibilities to collect information from people and their possessions in the open air, raises privacy questions. Because it concerns a patent application, it is unclear whether Yahoo actually wants to use it in practice. The company was also previously accused of privacy violations, by allegedly scanning e-mails on behalf of the American intelligence services.