[tekromancr]

We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly.

This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s

[aesthesia]

> they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to

Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.

[banana_giraffe]

An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say:

> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio

And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.

If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...