It seems that the day will not be long before the advertising companies will "read" the thousands of videos that exist all over the internet to analyze our social behavior and our reaction to any kind of public engagement.
In a recent interview, Mattersight, based in Chicago, revealed that created an automated system that reads all kinds of videos and analyzes the speech and expressions of the people participating in them, in order to "predict behavior based on the emotional state and personality of each person".
In short, companies that have an interest, such as advertising, statistics, etc., can now "read" a person's behavior from the analysis of video lesson which are widely available online through social media such as YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, etc.
The company even boasts of its software, also announcing the recent filing of a patent application. The goal of the application is for companies to be able to predict (and therefore handle) people's behavior by studying their speech and the expressions of their people algorithmically and outlining the personality profile of individual users.
Of course, Mattersight says its mission is to "help other companies better understand what their customers want," but without talking about "scanning" people without their consent.
This technology could be remodeled for mass surveillance by the police or the army. At the Winter Games in Sochi, 2014, a similar technology called VibraImage scrambled the faces of the visitors reading their expressions, in order to give the Russian FSB the ability to "identify someone who while seemingly ordinary has a disturbed mental state and may be an imminent threat".
And law enforcement agencies in the US are likely to be interested in collecting and analyzing people. Anyway, the FBI has a huge base data from biometrics for more than 52 millions faces. Many of them belong to American citizens who have never even been suspected of a crime.
