Ford Wants Billboards to Beam Distracting Ads to Screens Inside Your Car

Cars are just a canary, I think. And a dangerous one at that thanks to driver distraction. But longer term, as we get better autonomous driving systems, expect the interior of "your" vehicle to get plastered with advertisement. Welcome to the future!

(‘Henry Kuttner’ is pretty much another pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and his wife and co-author C.L. Moore.)

This vendor has a cool map you can see of all their screens. Most of them are the small screens on gas stations/stores/etc, but some are billboards. They recently signed a deal to put digital signage on top of ubers and taxis (but not inside the car). I'm not affiliated but attended a pitch of theirs.

https://www.adomni.com/inventory

Smart TVs violate your privacy [1] and push you ads [2] on a device you already paid good money for. But every major manufacturer has stopped producing dumb TVs, so what choice do we have?

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/...

[2]: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/

On the highway you get signs for 'McDonald's at this Exit' which is actually useful.

Of course, a lot of regular signage would be useful as well.

A display in front of you that showed you the 'current exit' - and frankly the current speed limit would be great.

From a positioning perspective, maybe Ford should do that: shows you the current, civic signage including speed limit, exits, nearest gas etc..

These are the systems I wish were designed for the mom & pop shops to participate. I'm wary that with private interests, it won't be the case.

This is absurd, why would they need "billboard-reading sensors"?

All they would need is the car's access to GPS. If an advertiser wants in-Ford ads to go along with a billboard, famous landmark, or a famous person's house they can do that.

I see zero needs for the archaic concept of a "billboard" to need to transmit data to a car in the future.

They do all of this instead of the most obvious and straightforward thing they SHOULD be doing: Building better vehicles.

In the near future they'll all be begging for bailouts yet again, and it will be because they keep focusing on stupid features instead of actually making their products better.

I can see a useful new trim feature as long as it is onl presented as a data point offered to platforms like Apple CarPlay; surfaced or not based on user settings. I see value in being able to flip through a list of most recently viewed billboards.

Not for me please, tiny screens, if i want to watch videos i have a phone.

This is fairly car specific, but there was some ok ad-hoc networking work in 802.11p, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE)[1]. Using a low-bit rate wireless channel to allow, effectively, broadcasting. Now everyone wants to get on cellular, which seems like it's probably an industry play, to lock in cell phone providers, to make sure consumers don't get access. Allegedly some occasional forms of v2v (vehicle to vehicle) or v2i (vehicle to infrastructure & reverse) do have a local "broadcast" form of cellular, that doesn't rely entirely upon existing cellular networks, but all this cellular stuff feels like a colossal degradation versus a fairly understandable, simple wifi system, that we failed with only through lack of trying.

There was Google's Physical Web[2], using a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon to broadcast a very short URL. That was integrated into Android! A notification could pop up! Ripe for abuse and bad, but it's the sort of thing I really wish the good & excited people had seized upon, had built something with. Incredible amount of potential and power. No longer developed, dropped from Android proper, but it's a simple specification, easy to implement in a couple hours. Google did a damned good job building, standardizing, promoting, trying, & this could be one instrumental way to have things in the world be able to advertise themselves digitally.

There's wifi-aware[3], for Neighbor Aware Networking, but it's hard to assess this tech. It all seems locked up being gummy sticky gnarly Apple and Android uses. There's no interop. But supposedly it's something to help us connect with those about us. I think there are some IEEE 802.11 standards in here somewhere, but wifi alliance are generally not super nice people who don't share & who keep consumers in the dark & let Apple and Google & occasional other huge player monopolize use of the technology they stamp their name on, alas.

Don't get me wrong, I'm afraid of a world where information & ads & other things bombard us, come at us from everywhere. But it distresses me to no end that we have almost no means to digitally connect with someone standing right next to us. That hopping on the same wifi is one of the only options. Or using some proprietary non-standard system that knows our identity & is tracking us, be it Google or Apple doing that tracking, doing that gatekeeping. It's weird as heck to me how advanced communications infrastructure is, but how it's still so fantastically centralized & top-down, and starting to get systems that allow us to be aware of other information resources is high on my interest list. That said, this article, especially with Vice's typical aggressive spin on the headline, doesn't sound particularly interesting or wanted to me, but it's in an area that seems radically under-examined, under-developed, that has had a fair share of could-be players pass by without making an impact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p

[2] http://google.github.io/physical-web/

[3] https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-aware

I realized this is click bait, but it could still be improved with some subtlety. Guide the reader to the conclusions you want with information instead of starting off with this nonsense.