Face-Scanning Screens That Can Determine Your Age and Gender Are Coming to a Gas Station Near You

A Tesco petrol forecourt. Photo via Flickr/Robert Wade

Next time you absent-mindedly watch the ads as you’re waiting to pay for a tank of gas, they might be watching you back.

Digital advertising company Amscreen (a division of Alan Sugar’s Amshold) has announced a deal with British supermarket giant Tesco to roll out its OptimEyes technology across their 450 petrol forecourts. Screens near the pump will have a built-in camera with facial detection to measure how many people are viewing, and to determine their gender and age range based on visual features. In a press release, Amscreen claims the tech will “help to deliver more measurable campaigns for advertisers, as well as more relevant on screen content for the Tesco customer.”

It’s not quite as slick (or intrusive) as the infamous personalized ads in Minority Report, as the system only uses facial detection, not facial recognition—so it won’t be tracking your individual consumer habits like some stores in Japan. Rather, it will enable advertisers to target specific demographics depending on who’s most likely to be looking at the screen at different times and locations, and to get a more accurate picture of how successful their campaigns are. Because viewer data is fed back live, ads could also be moved around on the fly to optimize exposure to relevant consumers.

It’s not quite at the level of personalised advertising in Minority Report.

Amscreen already has over 6,000 screens across Europe, and says the Tesco network will reach a weekly audience of 5 million. And don’t think you can escape it: Quividi, the audience measurement company behind the OptimEyes face-tracking technology, claims 94 percent of shoppers view their screens.

While it all sounds a little Big Brother, Tesco claims that the system doesn’t record or store any imagery and can’t tell who you are individually. That’s good from a privacy perspective, but probably means we can expect to be bombarded with annoyingly broad targeted content, with older men getting ads for “man stuff,” young women seeing “girly things,” and so on. However, Quividi’s gender classification seems to have more trouble with women wearing baseball caps, so if you want to confuse it, wearing a hat might be the answer.