Earlier this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a gaze-tracking system proposed by Google to monitor the pupils of a user wearing a head-mounted device, such as Google Glass, Fast Company reports. Connected to a server, the tracking system could infer emotion by detecting pupil dilation and eye movement and could potentially offer “a mechanism to track and bill offline advertisements in the manner similar to popular online advertisement schemes,” the patent states. In other words, the system could charge advertisers when opted-in users gaze at a given billboard, magazine, newspaper or other media. Additionally, the patent specifies that “personal identifying data may be removed from the data and provided to the advertisers as anonymous analytics.” A report by The New York Times delves into ubiquitous data collection, specifically data collected from wearable devices where “Records of voices and events will be a permanent part of the Internet the way text is already, held forever and searched, mined and inspected.”
Full Story