Anti-piracy tool will harvest and market your emotions

A night out at the movie theater cost a good chunk of change these days and is supposed to be a good time. But it's not fun when our privacy is kicked aside in the name of security and stopping piracy. After walking through a metal detector, which should assure cinema owners that individuals are not packing a camcorder for pirating purposes, and then handing over the big bucks to see a film, it's a bit aggravating when theater employees skulk down the aisles to stare with night-vision goggles as if each person in the theater is a potential pirate. 

The movie industry is in search of new ways to protect their movies from camcorder pirates and piracy in general. Security company Aralia Systems specializes in piracy tracking devices. Part of its intelligent surveillance include CCTV cameras and anti-camcorder systems that shine infrared light beams into a movie-watching audience. Those light beams reflect off camcorders and then trigger piracy alarms. 

After being awarded a grant, Aralia Systems teamed up with Machine Vision Lab in what seems like a massive invasion of your privacy beyond "in the name of security." Building on existing cinema anti-piracy technology, these companies plan to add the ability to harvest your emotions. This is the part where it seems that filmgoers should be eligible to charge movie theater owners. At the very least, shouldn't it result in a significantly discounted movie ticket? 

Machine Vision Lab's Dr Abdul Farooq told PhysOrg, "We plan to build on the capabilities of current technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras. We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement. ... It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays."  

Ernesto at Torrent Freak spoke to Dr. Farooq who revealed that Machine Lab intends to using 2D and 3D imaging technology partnered with analytics software to read moviegoers' physical reactions and emotions. The 2D cameras will detect emotion and collect movement data. The 3D camera data will "capture the audience as a whole as a texture."

Data miners harvest our online personal information, so does that make it peachy keen fine that Machine Lab intends to take it to next level? How do you feel about "secret surveillance" and being Big Brother watched so that every drop of in-real-life personal information can be extracted from you after you paid to sit in that cinema and enjoy a movie? More than camcorder pirate hunting, the technology will enable companies to cash in on your emotions and sell that personal information as marketing data. 

Dr. Farooq told Torrent Freak, "Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy.” 

Yeah, then they plan to fine-tune it to monitor our reactions to window displays and probably anywhere else the data can be used for surveillance and marketing. Will these other places also charge us an arm and a leg like movie theaters before secretly monitoring and marketing our data?

This seems like a blow to privacy and possibly piracy as well.