Advertisers keeping their eyes on you
STATEOFTHEART cameras popping up on billboards in the country’s main centres are tracking the number of times and types of vehicles that pass them in what is believed to be a world first.
But civil liberties experts say cameras using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to collect data about when a particular car is passing a certain point and how often raise privacy issues, despite assurances the new technology is not breaching privacy laws.
It comes amid growing concerns about how much private information people are giving away digitally, who is accessing it and how it is being used. This includes what is happening with the vast amount of information being collected by the Government’s NZ Covid Tracer app and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The new Lens cameras were launched in September last year and are used on all 25 Lumo billboards in New Zealand to provide marketing insight to media companies and companies using them to display their goods or services.
Most of the sites are in Auckland but there are two sites in Christchurch and one each in Hamilton, Tauranga and Wellington. They have at least two cameras to capture the front and rear number plates.
Lumo cofounder and chief executive Phil Clemas said the main reason they started introducing Lens technology in September was because there was no audience measuring platform in New Zealand for outofhome advertising and advertisers wanted to know how many people saw their ads and how many saw them more than once.
Since the company’s inception, it had been monitoring real time traffic volumes but the new technology gave insight into the frequency of vehicles going past and, paired with data purchased from NZTA, the model, make and year of manufacture for each one.
‘‘We don’t know demographics. We don’t capture any private information — we don’t go deeper than that.’’
While advertisers could make general assumptions that a person who drove a certain car might like a certain product, the main interest in the types of car passing each billboard came from the automotive industry.
For example if Mazda wanted to advertise a new car it could work out how many Mazdas drove past each site and that could help it pick the sites it wanted, he said.
He said the company strongly abided by the privacy laws and made it clear to clients that it did not track individual number plates or collect any private information.
However, NZ Council for Civil Liberties chairman Thomas Beagle was concerned it could lead to a breach of privacy laws.
‘‘We think there are some real privacy issues around capturing and storing this information, especially where people are just driving into a street.’’
While it could be argued there was a use for it in a private car park or building to check a car was parked in the right place and for the right amount of time, he felt tracking people’s movements on public roads was a step too far.
‘‘You can tell where people were at that point at that time. If you’ve got multiple billboards or cameras around they can start tracking their movements through the city and personally I think that goes a bit too far and I don’t think we want to go that far.
‘‘The ultimate end game of this is someone setting up a system where if they put up enough cameras around the place they can tell where everyone is going at any point and I don’t think we want that.’’
He argued that a number plate could in many cases be private information because it linked back to a person in the majority of cases and could therefore be a breach of privacy laws.
Buddle Findlay partner Tony Dellow, who specialises in privacy law, said collecting number plate information was not in itself a privacy breach unless it linked to identifiable information about an individual, which the company claimed it was not doing.
The grey area was whether there were safeguards in place to ensure the information did not identify a particular person and where they might be at a particular time.
‘‘If it was possible to identify the person associated with the car, then instantly collecting the information would breach the privacy act.’’
Auckland University associate professor in marketing Mike Lee said the main benefit in the technology was providing a solid number of how many cars had driven in front of a billboard in a certain time period.
Prof Lee said if advertisers really wanted to target advertising to a specific demographic then there might be better tools available to them, such as social media. — The New Zealand Herald
❛ We don’t know demographics. We don’t capture any private information