With fears around big corporations monitoring the general public at an all-time high, Tesco’s announcement that it is introducing advertising screens into petrol stations that will scan the faces of customers seems like peculiar timing.

The OptimEyes advertising screen – developed by Lord Sugar’s Amscreen and set to be introduced at all 450 Tesco petrol stations in the UK – can work out the gender and age of queuing customers, and can then run ads tailored to their demographic.

In an interview with The Grocer, Simon Sugar, son of Mr Apprentice and CEO of Amscreen, compared the tech to something out of Minority Report – something all the national papers have picked up on. After all, the hit 2002 sci-fi adaptation, in which Tom Cruise is bombarded by personalised ads as he walks down a high street, isn’t too far away from the sort of thing Tesco is set to offer.

Personally, I think the technology is fantastic.

The major retailers have seen phenomenal growth online, but just as important are the monitoring benefits that come with it. The information fed back to the likes of Tesco after an online shop can be beneficial to both parties, generating more accurate data on customer trends and allowing supermarkets to better fulfil the needs of individual customers. The OptimEyes system could potentially translate those benefits into stores.

Sugar has ambitions to bring the technology to all of the major supermarkets and it wouldn’t surprise me if that now happens. However, the fight will be in convincing customers – at a time when the papers are full of headlines about NSA surveillance– that this isn’t just another Orwellian move from a major corporation.

Nick Pickles, from Big Brother Watch, believes the technology will negatively impact the number of customers walking into Tesco petrol stations. However, should the technology keep to its core promise of not invading people’s privacy and only gathering basic information, and if it can ultimately provide customers with adverts that are actually useful, I doubt this will be the case.

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