When you walk past a digital billboard being played on the side of a building, chances are you don’t think too much about it, but maybe you should. In a report from Consumer Reports, it has been revealed that these digital billboards are actually tracking us in real-life, bringing some of the more intrusive parts of the internet onto the streets.

Ads on the internet rely on cookies to track what we are doing, and as such, more often than not, we start to see ads popup that are freakily coincidental. However, it seems that digital billboards we see on the streets are just as bad, where according to Frank O’Brien, the CEO of an advertising platform called Five Tier, revealed that these digital billboards comes with sensors and technology that can pick up on ID numbers from our smartphones as we walk past them.

Based on that, it can tell advertisers who is around the area and what kind of ads should be displayed. If you thought that these ads rotate on a random or scheduled basis, this revelation suggests that it might not always be the case. Based on this data, it can be used by advertisers to best determine what kind of ads to play in an area at a particular time of the day.

It might even spill over to your social media accounts, where companies that display ads on these digital billboards might “follow up” by showing you related ads on your social media feed. It also turns out that these practices aren’t exactly new, but its growth in popularity is a bit alarming.

Filed in General. Read more about . Source: consumerreports.org

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