If You Are Paranoid,

about Big Brother watching you,

 now would be a good time to stop reading, we are all aware of CCTV cameras, but what many people are not aware of is that advertising boards also take in details from you as you walk by and change the advertisements to suit you,

and this is the telltale camera to look out for, the monitoring system was accidentally revealed at the beginning of May, when the system crashed and software code was displayed on screen instead of the usual ads, Linus Tech Tips forum user “Nepturion” happened to be passing by Peppe’s Pizza, in an Oslo shopping centre in Norway, when he noticed the bizarre code generated on the digital advertising banner, a closer look revealed a small camera concealed in the wooden frame of the advert, and after watching the screen for a few minutes, Nepturion realised that the messages generated by the computer were describing him, and changed every time a different person passed by,

 the code included parameters like a “male – young adult”, “attention time”, “smile” and “glasses”, and was generated by a monitoring software designed to increase sales by displaying different adverts to passers by based on their sex, physical traits, and facial expression, Nepturion took some photos of the distopian-like digital banner and posted them online, where they quickly went viral and attracted the attention of mainstream media, “There is these billboard ads, which people look at for information. This isn’t news… but there is a camera over the billboard and it registers persons looking at the billboard itself,” Nepturion wrote on the Linus Tech Tips forum, “It gives feedback in form of code which is revealed when the software crashed.” 

it turns out that monitoring people in a public place like a shopping centre is not illegal, but following the backlash, Pepe’s Pizza decided to take down the controversial advertising banner, the pizzeria mentioned that they didn’t remove the monitoring system because it was freaking people out, but simply because its trial period had simply come to an end, no coincidence there then, but maybe Big Brother is really watching us, could the adverting billboard cameras be linked into a huge surveillance system? perhaps we should all be paranoid that some one is watching us!