5 Unbelievably Creepy Surveillance Tactics

http://www.alternet.org/5-unbelievably-creepy-surveillance-tactics

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1. Buses and street cars that can hear what you say .

You can't really go anywhere in America without being tracked by surveillance cameras. But seeing what people do is not enough; according to a report by the Daily, cities all over the country are literally bugging public transportation.

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2. Mannequins that can see you.

A handful of retailers in the US and Europe are installing mannequins in their stores that can determine customers' age, gender and race, Bloomberg reported last month. Don't worry, the face recognition-equipped camera is hidden, so there is no way to tell whether the giant plastic dolls in the store are watching you as you shop. The company that developed the mannequins (named EyeSee) sells their attributes thusly:

This special camera installed inside the mannequin's head analyzes the facial features of people passing through the front and provides statistical and contextual information useful to the development of targeted marketing strategies. The embedded software can also provide other data such as the number of people passing in front of a window at certain times of the day.

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3. Biometric time clocks.

For too long, employers lacked the ability to extract every second of labor from their workers with scientific precision. Thanks to the wonders of face recognition technology, many employees in low-wage workplaces are now required to log in to work on face recognition readers instead of using key cards or codes . Biometric time clocks like FaceIn, most commonly used at construction sites, create an avatar of the workers' face that the machine keeps forever and that ages alongside the employee. Allegedly, it can tell twins apart.