If you read the actual patent filing and look at their claims strategy it's very clear that what they want to be able to do is have it so when you drive by a billboard or road sign you can press something on your car's navigation display to navigate there. That seems like a useful navigation feature (e.g., for getting to a gas station) and not at all related to "beaming distracting ads into your car."
Not only should the in car interface lock itself when driving to a map or rear camera, but distracting video billboards in general should be banned for safety reasons. Tempting drivers to push buttons to make pop ups go away is just going to lead to deaths. I have a friend who died in a car accident and “ad revenue” doesn’t impress me as a justification
This law holds in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont. 3 out of the 4 are outermost states of the U.S., and the other is close to being so. Perhaps since there isn't much interstate traffic going through these states and their state populations are low, there was not so great of an incentive for advertisers to lobby against such laws banning highway ads.
Fantastic. They have this huge bright video billboard where I drive - at night it is ridiculously distracting. I have no idea how they pass muster on road safety rules.
I was in Byron Bay town last Saturday night. I saw a truck with three massive screen billboards driving around (advertising the new alcohol deliver service by Dan Murphys’s...). I couldn’t believe how bright it was driving behind it. How that is legal is beyond me! Last thing the country needs is more alcohol. Advertising in Australia is getting out of hand.
How does that not run afoul of first amendment rights? For example if I wanted to advertise my political view on a sign mounted on my land, would that really be something the state Dan block?
They're state laws. It's a 9th/10th Amendment issue. A federal billboard ban would certainly seem to violate the 1st.
A ban in California would seem illegal as well, due to the affirmative right to free speech contained in the California Constitution (see Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins).
Here in Maine, on-premises signs are allowed but have strict limitations:
It looks like sign bans are usually unconstitutional when content-based, where the substance of what is being communicated is taken into account (e.g. bans on only commercial signs), but generally hold up if content-neutral and based on reasonable factors, such as safety or aesthetics.
See Reed v. Town of Gilbert (content-based ban struck down) versus Scenic Arizona v. City of Phoenix (content-neutral and safety-based ban on electronic signs upheld).
If the sign throws fireworks at passers-by, yes. Because the point of a billboard ban is not their contents, but the distraction they cause. It would be enough to tune them down and nobody would mind but yeah, losing perceived ad revenue is somehow never the first thought.
If they were building an in-car communication service, that would be one thing.
But "click here to interact with street ads" seems pretty pointless to me, just one more bullshit distraction.
I will note, I have not owned a car this century, and only drive when I need to. But I don't even want a screen in my car. The only useful feature is the backup camera, and I'm fine parallel parking for myself, if the cost of the camera is every other control moves to a fucking touch screen.
I'm probably going to have to buy something in the next couple of years, and I'm pretty sure it is going to be a very old truck that predates the crapification.
I'd hope it would just be a simple button to "bookmark" the content or program the coordinates into your navigation. Otherwise this seems like the exact kind of distracted driving that most distracted driving laws are trying to prevent.
While I can imagine ways to design a simple protocol so poorly that what you suggest is possible, I don't know if I'd be able to make one by accident. It seems unlikely that the designers of the technology are aiming for that.
"Here is the address to the advertised burger king. Do you wish to go there now?" The yes fills the screen and can't be dismissed, the little 'x' to close it is offscreen because a developer forgot that screens have different sizes in different vehicles.
The value is that the kind of person who like, buys a new car, is someone who buys shit generally, a proverbial whale consumer. They could just sell the purchaser lists directly, and it would already get you 80% of the way there (20% is the intent, although is there really intent if you look at a billboard?)
This is definitely on their radar, at least conceptually. At the Ford developer conference they shared the idea of the zero dollar car. At signing, you are given the option to let them collect various data points (barometer, location for traffic, location for advertising, etc) in exchange for cost reductions on the final price.
I am usually very anti advertising, but I don’t understand the backlash here. If it’s done tastefully as you describe it’s basically just a hands free QR code.
Rules:
- opt in: nothing happens unless I click the “I saw something on a billboard” button
I would add to this; I’ve driven by billboards and actually wanted the phone number/website but didn’t catch it in time. So while like anything it could be abused. It also serves a useful purpose
Having your navigation display change because a company want to divert you from your destination sounds exactly like "beaming distracting ads into my car". Even a message will distract people more than necessary, humans already prove their focus is poor as hell. It'll feel like your car has a life of it's own, and that life is now capitalism.
The closest thing to this that exists now is probably the ads in Waze, but those only show up when you're stopped and vanish when you start accelerating again.
Beaming ads onto mobile or mobile-like devices is an inevitable trend we're going to see over the next decade. For example, most TV watchers actually attend to their phone over the TV. How long will it be before Galaxy phones start beaming Samsung TV ads to your device? And Apple TVs? If they (TV manufacturers) all align on this, there's no real escape.
Cars are just a canary, I think. And a dangerous one at that thanks to driver distraction. But longer term, as we get better autonomous driving systems, expect the interior of "your" vehicle to get plastered with advertisement. Welcome to the future!
There is an escape, for now: stop connecting things to the internet when they don't need to be. Of course, there is nothing stopping the industry from replacing HDMI with a standard that must include an internet connection...
They already did, I know that HDMI 2.0 includes Ethernet and if the host (computer or TV stick) has internet it will transparently share it with the TV which can then happily install updates and show you ads.
Can you name any combination of devices that actually does this? I've never seen an implementation of it, in over a decade of this being an optional part of HDMI.
> I know that HDMI 2.0 includes Ethernet and if the host (computer or TV stick) has internet it will transparently share it with the TV
Technically, you can encode whatever the hell you want over an HDMI cable. Whether or not the terminating end is able to receive/interpret it is a different story, however. The cost of implementing end-to-end-Ethernet-over-HDMI is so high that it would almost certainly be prohibitive to modern production, much less the production capabilities of 2013, when the spec for HDMI 2.0 was released.
At some point the price will be worth it to put cell modems in almost everything. A permanent internet connection for all of your devices/appliances that can't be disabled without putting it in a Faraday cage or physically destroying the modem.
Well, that’s at least one company from which I, although perhaps mistakenly, wouldn’t expect that. And being proven wrong would probably make me reconsider my purchase habits.
I mean, Apple TV still gives you recommended stuff on your dashboard. That's just a stones throw away from the FireTV default of playing a preview of whatever is recommended to you on your dashboard, and that's basically a stones throw away to just showing you ads. You can't delineate whether something is an ad or not just based on where it's being shown. Apple already sells higher ranking search results in the app store (Suggested Apps), so it's not a radically different change from what we have now. Really it just involves Apple combining autoplay and context-aware suggestions.
True. But the key difference, for now, is that I, again, perhaps mistakenly, believe that their interest still is to make something that serves my purpose well enough for me to want to buy more of their products later.
That, in some way, their way of selling me stuff is to align their interests with mine (as long as I subscribe to their closed way of doing things).
Which isn’t something I can say I believe of Facebook, Google, LG or Samsung (I believe they once even made their TVs connect to public open WiFis when you didn’t set them up. Makes me want to tear out that antenna).
Even though it’s perhaps only marketing posturing; the App Store ads are starting to blur that line. And I could see how well targeted ads could be construed to yield the same effect.
For a large company, filing a patent is probably a sign that some team internally has looked at implementing it. I'd expect that there is some sort of internal budget dedicated towards filing patents, and an internal team in charge of deciding which internal patent applications are worth actually pursuing.
While ideally you'd want to focus on patents for things you're actively pursuing, if there's budget for more patents and the latest set of applications are weak, then the team could end up pursuing applications that the development team has no intention of pursuing further.
In that vein, I'd suggest that "wants to" is a stronger description of intent than actually happens with corporate patent filings.
And one can't forget defensive patent filing, where companies will file patents on anything and every idea they can come up with even tangentially related to what management actually wants, as a way of preventing somebody else from doing the same and then suing them over any overlapping elements.
While the article is just another trash piece, there's a short story by ‘Henry Kuttner’ describing pretty much the future into which we're heading with electronics all over the place and everything connected to the web, in conjunction with the ad industry. It's basically the definitive text on the topic for me. The story is called ‘Year Day’, and it should be in the public domain unless renewed somehow—however a quick search for the text turns up nothing. It was first published in the collection ‘Ahead of Time’.
(‘Henry Kuttner’ is pretty much another pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and his wife and co-author C.L. Moore.)
1) Waze has been doing this for a while which addresses context as they're only served to a geofenced area:
https://www.waze.com/business/
2) QR Codes & Lane Assist cameras. Boom, done. Pay $F a bunch of $/BTC/RUB to put your companies ads on their allow list, no allow list, no open URL for Johnny Drop Tables.
I was looking at getting a new truck. The Ford F550 Lariat is nice, but I am not paying for anything that can receive messages I did not request. There better be an off-menu option for a no-internet, no-bluetooth, no-RF, no-ODB3 or I will just stick with old used vehicles.
For context, this type of advertising falls into "digital out of home" or DOOH. DOOH is going to be the next big thing (connected TV like roku/etc is the current big thing). Consider how antiquated a normal billboard is, when you could make it digital and get many more features.
This vendor has a cool map you can see of all their screens. Most of them are the small screens on gas stations/stores/etc, but some are billboards. They recently signed a deal to put digital signage on top of ubers and taxis (but not inside the car). I'm not affiliated but attended a pitch of theirs.
These taxi and gas station video ads suck. Eventually we need laws against intruding on people's mental space with this shit. Nothing else will stop the bloodsucking advertisement monster.
Smart TVs violate your privacy [1] and push you ads [2] on a device you already paid good money for. But every major manufacturer has stopped producing dumb TVs, so what choice do we have?
> The company's patent filing describes a system that would equip cars with billboard-reading sensors, allowing cars to scan roadside signs for relevant information and then display them on screens inside smart cars.
This is absurd, why would they need "billboard-reading sensors"?
All they would need is the car's access to GPS. If an advertiser wants in-Ford ads to go along with a billboard, famous landmark, or a famous person's house they can do that.
I see zero needs for the archaic concept of a "billboard" to need to transmit data to a car in the future.
I'm always floored when I read about legacy automakers coming up with increasingly more esoteric gimmicks to make money or supposedly make their cars "better". Ideas like massage seats, MORE screens, soft close doors, built in coolers, etc. etc.
They do all of this instead of the most obvious and straightforward thing they SHOULD be doing: Building better vehicles.
In the near future they'll all be begging for bailouts yet again, and it will be because they keep focusing on stupid features instead of actually making their products better.
I want a car that warns you that your headlights are off when driving at night.
I want a car with spare headlight bulbs built into the headlights so when one burns out the spare automatically turns on and a warning is displayed that you need to replace a headlight.
LED headlights are becoming standard, and they have a much longer lifespan than traditional bulbs. Even my 2014 Toyota Corolla (without basic luxuries such as cruise control) has LED headlights.
What a terrible idea and not only for the chance of distracting the driver. Lets put our tinfoil hats on for a moment and imagine that the developers of this system don't properly sanitize the input from whatever sensors look for this advertising data. Now there is another ingress route for a malicious actor.
I can see a useful new trim feature as long as it is onl presented as a data point offered to platforms like Apple CarPlay; surfaced or not based on user settings. I see value in being able to flip through a list of most recently viewed billboards.
That reminds me of a science fiction novel (Azimov?), which starts with the main character driving a car full of annoying distracting ads, and the richest companies made ads that were just silence.
Yup. Regarding the silent ads, State Farm (an insurance firm) literally does that now. They have a genial looking spokesperson and run mildly comedic soft-sell adverts, then follow up a few months later with a sequel that has no dialog at all but gently reminds viewers of the midly comedic campaign. It's brilliant psychology.
Ignoring cars for a moment, it's just super sad to me how bad the state of ad-hoc connectivity is.
This is fairly car specific, but there was some ok ad-hoc networking work in 802.11p, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE)[1]. Using a low-bit rate wireless channel to allow, effectively, broadcasting. Now everyone wants to get on cellular, which seems like it's probably an industry play, to lock in cell phone providers, to make sure consumers don't get access. Allegedly some occasional forms of v2v (vehicle to vehicle) or v2i (vehicle to infrastructure & reverse) do have a local "broadcast" form of cellular, that doesn't rely entirely upon existing cellular networks, but all this cellular stuff feels like a colossal degradation versus a fairly understandable, simple wifi system, that we failed with only through lack of trying.
There was Google's Physical Web[2], using a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon to broadcast a very short URL. That was integrated into Android! A notification could pop up! Ripe for abuse and bad, but it's the sort of thing I really wish the good & excited people had seized upon, had built something with. Incredible amount of potential and power. No longer developed, dropped from Android proper, but it's a simple specification, easy to implement in a couple hours. Google did a damned good job building, standardizing, promoting, trying, & this could be one instrumental way to have things in the world be able to advertise themselves digitally.
There's wifi-aware[3], for Neighbor Aware Networking, but it's hard to assess this tech. It all seems locked up being gummy sticky gnarly Apple and Android uses. There's no interop. But supposedly it's something to help us connect with those about us. I think there are some IEEE 802.11 standards in here somewhere, but wifi alliance are generally not super nice people who don't share & who keep consumers in the dark & let Apple and Google & occasional other huge player monopolize use of the technology they stamp their name on, alas.
Don't get me wrong, I'm afraid of a world where information & ads & other things bombard us, come at us from everywhere. But it distresses me to no end that we have almost no means to digitally connect with someone standing right next to us. That hopping on the same wifi is one of the only options. Or using some proprietary non-standard system that knows our identity & is tracking us, be it Google or Apple doing that tracking, doing that gatekeeping. It's weird as heck to me how advanced communications infrastructure is, but how it's still so fantastically centralized & top-down, and starting to get systems that allow us to be aware of other information resources is high on my interest list. That said, this article, especially with Vice's typical aggressive spin on the headline, doesn't sound particularly interesting or wanted to me, but it's in an area that seems radically under-examined, under-developed, that has had a fair share of could-be players pass by without making an impact.
Stopped reading after first line 'Advertisers are motivated by a singular goal, and that is to turn every facet of human existence into an opportunity to show you ads.'
I realized this is click bait, but it could still be improved with some subtlety. Guide the reader to the conclusions you want with information instead of starting off with this nonsense.
That sentence bothered me right off the bat, too. In fact, I have it copied because I was going to comment on it.
‘Advertisers’ would actually love for ads to be super rare... and only have their ad ever be shown. Their true desire is to have as many people as possible purchase their product.
Advertising space sellers ‘singular goal’ is to get paid as much as possible from advertisers. They probably want fewer overall ads to be displayed, because that would make their space to display ads more valuable. They would love to be the only place ads are displayed.
Ad brokers are probably the only ones who really want ads everywhere, because they make money on volume.
