Even if they do this type of research and don't release it to the public, you can bet nations states already are doing the same research in private, and using it against whoever they want.
Better to have this in the public eye, than to be too scared to carry out the research in fear of others abusing it. because whether the research is done publicly or not, the "bad guys" are probably doing it in private.
Your threat model for ubiquitous cheap sensing tech is nation states? I'm not overly worried about being spied on by nation states. In general, my feeling is that if a nation-state decides I'm important enough to deploy hardware against, I have no real defense.
Now, big tech companies putting it everywhere, and either convincing the stores I shop at or my neighbors to pay for the hardware and slurping up the data - that is a real danger case. And those companies build off academic research like this. Even trillion-dollar companies don't do as much of this research inhouse as they do by sponsoring grants like this.
The problem is not that they can't spy on you as an individual. The problem is that they can spy on everyone all the time. And then later use an arbitrary amount of historical data to do whatever they want. I'd rather not see that any government becomes omniscient about the past.
>Your threat model for ubiquitous cheap sensing tech is nation states? I'm not overly worried about being spied on by nation states. In general, my feeling is that if a nation-state decides I'm important enough to deploy hardware against, I have no real defense.
Nation states worry me precisely because I'm uninteresting. They wouldn't deploy hardware against me, but I'm under no illusion that they wouldn't use every mass-surveillance option available to them, including mass exploitation of commodity hardware.
I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your post.
What reassure me is that the americans are so aggressive and dangerous that they become huge money pit target, leaving the rest of us quite free from foreign espionage.
I can't tell if you mean that most nation state espionage resources are spent keeping a watchful eye on the U.S. since they see the U.S. as aggressive and dangerous, or you mean that literally American citizens are aggressive and dangerous (i.e. perhaps due to prevalence of firearms with non-conformist, anti-government, anti-authority views), that the U.S. spends much of its own resources spying on its own citizens?
Stuff used by national governments eventually trickles down to the local level.
I’d hate for my town counsel to spy on me simply because they can with off the shelf hardware, that the military developed and deemed obsolete 10 years ago.
But your clerks aren’t going to record every step i take for a decade inside your store and run algorithms to manipulate my brain into optimizing store outcomes.
I've worked on systems designed to send in-store customers custom, extremely time limited (< 1 hour) coupons based on where they are in the store and where they linger. Linger time being used as an indicator of purchase intent for a specific item. This does require that the customer has the store's app installed and running.
This type of placement scoring is almost never done via security cameras. The CV and data storage costs required for that to work at scale would be enormous.
It’s much easier and cheaper to just record what shelve/height/area products are placed in and reconcile that data with sales. The data will be more noisy, but you can capture so much more valuable information for the same investment. You can also usually apply the models in retrospect, since most larger chains already record where products are supposed to be.
Cameras are really only used at corporate test stores in small numbers. Camera data is usually looked at manually and only focuses on a specific product or area.
Better to have this in the public eye, than to be too scared to carry out the research in fear of others abusing it. because whether the research is done publicly or not, the "bad guys" are probably doing it in private.