A consortium of 11 railway companies has installed 27 facial recognition-enabled billboards in subway stations around Tokyo as a one-year pilot project that will collect data on passersby, reports CNET News. A spokesperson for the Digital Signage Promotion Project said, "The camera can distinguish a person's sex and approximate age, even if the person only walks by in front of the display, at least if he or she looks at the screen for a second." The information gleaned could then be used by marketers to strategically schedule their marketing campaigns and tailor them by gender. Project officials say they won't store images taken by the billboard cameras.
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