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Spooked by tech: How well do your tools know you?

Not all scary things go bump in the dark, slither into your nightmares or crawl out of TV screens. If you think you know yourself, try going up against your own technology. In this haunting time, we take a look at some of the technology that might just keep you up at night.

For all of those horror movie fans, watch this YouTube video to see just how creepy some of the modern surveillance tech looks. I mean, thermal image scanning for specific crime-causing temperatures has to be a joke, right?

  • Remember how well tracking crimes before they happened worked in “Minority Report”? Well, this technology isn’t far off from that. Houston-based BRS Labs has created a thermal-imaging camera that reads body temperatures and movement to detect what it defines as “pre-crime” activities. The camera is called AISight, and has already been found in several places throughout Chicago, Boston, and Washington D.C.
  • As if mannequins aren’t creepy, life-sized humans without faces enough, imagine them understanding and watching your every move. Shopperception is a company making small cameras fitted to a mannequin’s eye to watch you. Based on your engagement with the clothes it has on, stores are able to make more knowledgeable decisions about what kinds of outfits sell better. Keep an eye out for these while you’re out shopping this holiday season.
  • If you ever hear a sound while you’re at that large tech retailer that whispers, “Buy the computer,” you may not be crazy. Audio Spotlights were created by a former Bose engineer/MIT grad to target people with sound the same way a spotlight targets people with light. Originally used in museums and theme parks, Audio Spotlights are sounding off in some 7-11 and T-Mobile stores.
  • Get rid of your key cards, fingerprint scanners and eyeball readers. An Alabama startup has released an ID reader that can recognize you from 20 feet away by just waving a hand. IDair started with the military and hopes to branch into a store near you.
  • Stop getting to the grocery store and wondering what’s missing in your fridge. Smart fridges are cropping up more and more these days to give you a live feed of your box straight to your phone. It’s all cool until you think about the Internet-of-Things and how it wouldn’t be too outside the realm of possibilities that your information could be more open than every before.

The scariest part of all of this is that it is only going to continue growing and becoming more in our lives, so good luck going to sleep knowing that tonight. Your nightlight might soon be able to recognize you getting up soon and who knows where that information goes.

What’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen in technology?

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