T3 Walking barcodes T3 Walking barcodes What’s going on? For some time, we’ve been trackable by the data our online behavior generates. Now, the bleed of technology into the real world means that our physical behavior is also generating trackable data, connecting us to the wider digital ecosystem that monitors our streets. As physical features become machine-readable, The Economist recently noted, our faces can be read like a barcode. Your body becomes a signature. Already, facial and body language recognition enable seamless interactions such as unlocking things, personalized curation of messages and content, and paying for purchases. In China, Alipay – the financial arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba – has developed “Smile to Pay”, for example. In insurance, Zurich’s FaceQuote lets people get a life insurance quote with just one selfie. In entertainment, Disney piloted an interactive movie poster with Accenture Interactive. The AI-powered experience used photography and emotion recognition to enable a poster for the movie Dumbo, which could display a version of the movie poster that corresponded with the expression on the face of the person looking at it. Governments, too, are taking an interest: India is planning one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems while in China, the authorities are building the world’s most extensive facial recognition database – with the power to identify any one of As advanced technology arrives on our streets, our its 1.3 billion citizens in seconds. In the US, the Pentagon has faces and body language will be trackable, enabling invested in technology that can identify people at a distance personalized experiences in physical environments. by their heartbeat, which is as unique to them as their iris or fingerprint. 37 38