Microsoft patents emotion-based advertising system

[weakmagneto]

by Andrea Lee-Greenberg, CBC News
Posted: June 11, 2012 4:44 PM

Microsoft has filed a patent application for a computer system that will allow advertisers to target customers based on their emotions.

The patent includes a method to determine emotion over a certain period of time using a variety of methods, including:

•Monitoring a user's online activity for tone and content.
•Combing through a user's online history, such as search queries, emails and instant messages, to check tone.
•Examining a user's facial expressions, speech patterns, gestures and body movements, captured by image or audio devices.

The system would then store the user's emotional state - positive, happy, confused, neutral, negative, angry or sad - in what the patent calls "an emotional state database."

Meanwhile, a second database would contain advertisements targeted specifically to people with certain emotions.

Put the two together, and Microsoft can target the right ad to the right people, those who are "emotionally compatible."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/20 ... ising.html

At the end of the article they ask some really great questions: What are your thoughts on this invention? Would you want Microsoft to monitor your emotional state? Do you consider it revolutionary, intrusive - or maybe both?

[weakmagneto]

I find this very intrusive. I wonder how they will implement it? In Canada, we have our privacy laws, I wonder how that will factor into play...

[Marshall]

Perhaps the concept of Evil is not obsolete. Should we maybe refuse to forget this word? -- let it not fade from our language? Perhaps we need to revive and dust off this old medieval idea, because some things people do (whether organized in giant corporations or not) can actually be evil?

Here they don't mean "compatibility": finding people who are compatible for the ad. No. They mean VULNERABLE.
They mean having the machine track the moods of individuals so that it knows who is vulnerable (to a particular sales pitch.) This simply is not decent.

[flannel jesus]

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