Japanese Taxis Are Using Facial Recognition to Target Ads to Riders

By: Futurism

April 22, 2019

If you took a cab in Japan this year, you may have come face-to-face with a tablet that scanned your face in order to learn your gender, age, and other characteristics — and used that data to target you with relevant advertisements.

The facial recognition system made the rounds on Twitter on Saturday after Google privacy engineer Rosa Golijan posted a photo of the tablet explaining that it was used in Japanese taxis to “estimate gender in order to deliver the most optimized content” — an intriguing preview of how pushy, personalized advertisements could one day roll out elsewhere in the world.