Surveillance as Handy Marketing Tool

A lot of new products are coming out that help companies use existing CCTV surveillance technology for marketing purposes--capturing everything from basic data about how many people stopped at a promotional display to more advanced details about particular customers. In addition to the camera-and-box equipped billboards being piloted by TruMedia and Quividi, Google recently announced its partnership with a company called Xuuk to produce a palm-sized camera called the Eyebox that will track how many times people look at both billboards and products in stores. The idea is to provide brick-and-mortar stores or companies the same tracking abilities in real life as they have with Google ads online. Personally, I think using face recognition with an already existent system (like, I don't know, a 3VR system!) makes better financial sense than spending $25,000 for a separate system and cameras, but even above and beyond that, using surveillance systems as marketing tools doesn't exactly help to assuage the public's "Big Brother" concerns about surveillance.