What nobody in taxpayerland seemed to remark on was how the most sensitive tasks imaginable had been outsourced to an independent contractor with a GED. This, after all, is the real secret of Washington -- the government itself doesn't do a whole lot, it just farms stuff out and then sits back and "manages." Or tries to.
But forget that for a minute. Here's something that will send you seeking a piece of gauze to tape over your computer's webcam: An advertising unit set up by AOL says it can monitor how you feel about the ads the Web constantly throws at you by watching your facial expressions.
Heh, and you thought that camera only worked when you asked it to.
Watching you watching us
Turns out AOL's "Be On" platform watches you watch the Web and measures your response to what you see by tracking your eye movements and other facial responses.
The platform is powered by Realeyes, a tech firm that says it has figured out how to control the cameras built into your laptop, desktop, tablet and smartphone to "read faces and measure human emotion."
But don't worry. The company says that at the moment it is only spying on consumers who have opted in to tests being organized by a couple of market research firms.
But that, of course, is only the beginning. Be On CEO René Rechtman says AOL is already considering ways it could deploy the technology to track the emotional sentiment of its general users who want to opt into it, Online Media Dailyreported.
“It has always been very clear that content that has a strong emotional component has a much greater engagement and consumer response. We always knew that, but we didn’t have the science to execute it,” Rechtman said. “Now we have the technology and the science to measure how content affects people emotionally.”
Content, in this instance, is presumably ads. But then again, not necessarily. Perhaps the next step in the "happy talk" that infects TV news is to use Be On's technology to weed out stories that upset viewers, concentrating instead on stories about cute kittens and brave children who overcome adversity.
Politicians could make good use of it too. Although, come to think of it, if we knew they were watching us while we were watching them, there could be interesting consequences, not all of them necessarily tasteful.