Sidewalk traffic being monitored from apartment windows?

(Thanks to Sophos Ltd.)

Got a nice street view out the window of your New York City apartment?

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/69091237" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

"Nice" as in, a view that overlooks stores, restaurants, bars, or shops, with a window you could suction-cup an old smartphone onto and use it to surveil anybody passing by?

That's what Placemeter wants you to do, and it's offering cash - up to $50/month - as long as you keep your phone attached to that window and its Placemeter app running.
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/69091237">This video</a> shows how the company will use the real-time data to collect and deliver information such as how crowded a place is, how long the wait is, and whether it will get more or less crowded in the next hour.

The company's algorithm counts the number of people entering shops and monitors traffic levels to output aggregated and anonymised data that it then sells to local businesses, urban planners and advertisers so that they can get a more accurate measurement of activity within the city - good for, say, planning where to put a playground, Placemeter suggests.

Florent Peyre, the co-founder of Placemeter, told the Guardian that the company's counting and measuring tool is one aspect of endowing computers with the ability to recognise objects in live video feed:

For example, this type of shape or group of pixels is most likely to be a pedestrian or a car or a bus.

It's almost like giving the gift of sight to a computer, he said, which should scare the bejesus out of the privacy-minded.

But wait, Peyre said, it's not that NSA-ishly freaky, given that "no one is really watching the video to classify objects.”

Placemeter says it neither stores the video feed it receives, nor does its analysis include facial recognition.

Read the article at <a href="https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/10/29/placemeter-monitors-streets-... Security, security news from Sophos</a>