It’s New Year’s Eve. You can’t decide whether to hit the Allston pub or the Cambridge bar. But if your smartphone could tell you how crowded the two places were, the ratio of men to women inside, even the average age of the crowds, would that make the decision easier?
A company called SceneTap has launched a smartphone application at more than 30 bars, mostly in Boston and Cambridge, that it says can do all that right now.
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Welcome to the future. We protect you.
Articles like this one make me glad I've resisted the siren song of social networking sites thus far. Personal privacy seems to be going out the window.
On a different note, I am curious about how SceneTap makes a profit. The article did not make that clear.
You don't get to opt out of the massive invasion of privacy going on by resisting social networking. Wait until all of your medical records are on-line, if they aren't already. Ever see a computer system that can't be hacked for fun or profit, especially since corporations always skimp on privacy protection to save money? Trust me, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
I can think of a number of ways it could make a profit. The bars or their parent companies might pay to track their clientele's demographic. The liquor companies would know where to target their promotions. For instance would you send in the Jaegermeister girls if the crowd was less than a certain percentage of one sex or another?
Maybe they can use their software to see what the groups are like. Did six women come into together? Then what kind of profitable drinks could be pushed to that group? Mostly men in mid-twenties? Time to raise the Budweiser prices?
And, as mentioned before, maybe the cities and towns would be interested in how many people are in a bar and how old they are.
Just don't go to those bars and those cameras will come out of the ceiling pretty quickly.
Can you imagine the cry from the bars if the city wanted them to install such a system so they could track, in real time, whether or not an establishment is overcrowded. Or check to see if there are underaged patrons?
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