If I can count on any two things in this world, it's that salsa will always taste good, no matter what kind it is, and everyone will freak out at some point about privacy settings via Facebook. I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg's sister can't figure it out, what hope is there for my 91 year old Grandmother? That said, if you think it's fun to watch confused fellow humans try to figure out simple pictures privacy and whatnot on Facebook, wait until the next generation of advertising techniques hits. That's really been the problem when we've talked in the past about the "uncanny valley" and how these techniques will impact their markets: implementation is everything. Too creepy and the ads will be universally despised. Too optional and you risk a lack of adoption. Not tailored enough in an attempt to be less "creepy" and the ads aren't effective.

Those are the thoughts in my mind when I see reports of emerging ads/deals technology like Facedeals.

Facial recognition cameras are installed at local businesses. These cameras recognize your face when you pass by, then check you in at the location. Simultaneously, your smartphone notifies you of a customized deal based on your Like history.

Find out which of your friends is willing to deal in illicit eyeballs, folks, because we've just gone Minority Report. Before your creepy-siren goes ballistic, keep in mind that this is strictly an opt-in service that users would have to allow on Facebook. On the other hand, the privacy settings for Facebook were supposed to be transparent as well and we've already discussed how well that's working out. There's an extremely fine line to walk here, and I don't want to come off as a luddite, but I'm afraid that not enough users of Facebook will want to opt in to something like this unless they're really shown some value in it which they can't refuse.

Unless that happens, the above description is probably going to scare people. I don't think the other details on their site help much, either.

The check-in app must be authorized via your Facebook account. With your help, the app verifies your most recent photo tags, using those to map the physical appearance of your face. Our custom-developed cameras then simply use this existing data to identify you in the real world. Personalized deals can now be delivered to your smartphone from all participating locations — all you have to do is show your face.

Sure, all I have to do is show my face and any place with one of these cameras (which I may not know when I enter the store) will check me in on Facebook. This is in stark contrast to the manual check-in on apps like Foursquare. It's all I need to be minding my own business, doing some shopping, and have my friends see Facebook checking me in to "Dirty Randy's Video Store". Nah, I think I'd opt out.

The uncanny valley refers to the creepy-looking appearance that many computer-generated people have when their virtual features don't quite seem as natural as the real thing. But as technology improves, virtual people are starting to look more natural and less like zombies. Here are just a few examples of some artificial humans that are bound to become more widespread and acceptable.

• The NY Port Authority is renting some avatars for a few months to serve as customer service agents for travelers to New York city. Does Siri really need a face? Let's just hope there's no "blue screen of death" for these automated agents... [url]
• Tupac Shakur is on tour again as a hologram -- prompting some folks to question some aspects of the intellectual property rights of dead artists. Forget using real artists, there are already completely fabricated singers/actors. [url]
• Using just a PS3, game developer Quantic Dream demoed a virtual android named Kara to promote its technological skills in creating real-looking fake people. With better hardware/software, it looks like developers could jump over the uncanny valley entirely. [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

A few years back we talked about how the concept of the "uncanny valley" could be applied to targeted advertising. Of course, the general concept of the uncanny valley is usually discussed in the field of robotics. It's the notion that people are comfortable with robots that clearly look like robots, but at a point where they become too similar to humans, but not actually human-like, people feel rather uncomfortable. However, if a robot appears fully human, then people go back to being comfortable with them -- even to the point of identifying with them and feeling empathy for them. The problem is the area where they're "too human" but just different enough to just... feel "off" that somehow makes it "creepy." As we noted the same thing really was kind of true for targeted advertising. As advertising gets more "targeted" it seems to creep people out, because they feel like they're being spied on.

A perfect example of that is seen in this recent NYTimes Magazine piece, talking about the details of how Target mines its purchasing data to figure out who's pregnant and when they're due. And it's not because they're buying diapers or something like that:

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

But, of course, Target then appears to have run into the "uncanny valley" problem of having just enough info to target ads... but doing so in a way that feels creepy:

"If we send someone a catalog and say, 'Congratulations on your first child!' and they've never told us they're pregnant, that's going to make some people uncomfortable," Pole told me. "We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy."

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

Target appears to have recognized just how creepy this appeared -- and once they discovered that the reporter was working on this story they cut off his access to the researcher and wouldn't talk to him at all, other than to make bland PR statements about "delivering outstanding value," and, later, to try to convince him not to publish his story.

However, there are indications that Target tried to cross the uncanny valley.... by making the extremely targeted advertising appear more "life like" by not being "too perfect." That is they still sent targeted ads, but mixed them in with unrelated ads, so people wouldn't realize how targeted they were:

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.

"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

I'm sure that this disturbs some people, who may sense that there's "trickery" going on here, but I'm not sure that's the case. It seems like this actually creates something rather useful. After all, perfectly targeted ads actually provide useful information in that it's ads/deals/coupons targeted for exactly what we need, such that we'll actually save money on the key things we want. That's a benefit to consumers. But if it's done in a way that doesn't feel as creepy, then there aren't those lingering concerns of being tracked -- and that seems a more reasonable fear.

Yikes. There are plenty of reasons why Google's Street View offering is not the privacy nightmare that some people are trying to turn it into. It's a public view of things that anyone can see. It's also static and way out of date. But, Google's going to run into problems if it keeps letting CEO Eric Schmidt comment on the various privacy concerns people are raising. While we were among those who mocked the ridiculously over-exaggerated anti-Google video made by the group Consumer Watchdog, that tried to portray Eric Schmidt as a creepy old man spying on everything you do, Schmidt himself isn't doing the company any favors lately. We already had mentioned his bizarre idea that kids might change their names upon becoming adults in the future, but Schmidt just keeps on making rather creepy statements about privacy that suggests someone totally out of touch with what people are actually complaining about.

John Paczkowski has a list of Schmidt's rather tone-deaf responses to privacy questions lately:

• Addressed criticisms of Google's stance on privacy by saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
• Claimed people want Google to "tell them what they should be doing next."
• Said of Google, "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
• Said this: "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
• Suggested name changes to protect adults from the Web's record of their youthful indiscretions.
• Said this: "What we're really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don't do well better."

And, then, there's the latest, in which he claims that one reason why Street View isn't so bad is because you could just move, claiming (not quite accurately) that Street View only visits every place once. But that's unrelated to the issue. Street View isn't telling people where you live, so whether or not you live there or if you move is sort of meaningless. There are plenty of reasonable ways to respond to such a question, but it seems like each time Schmidt opens his mouth about these issues, he sounds incredibly out of touch and totally disconnected from the thing that people are actually complaining about.

In robotics, there's a concept of the "uncanny valley," which suggests that people are comfortable with robots that clearly look like robots, but at a point where they become too similar to humans, but not actually human-like, the feeling makes people rather uncomfortable. However, if a robot appears fully human, then people go back to being comfortable with them -- even to the point of identifying with them and feeling empathy for them. It's that area where they're just a little too much like a human, but not quite there that makes people really uncomfortable. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a similar phenomenon with advertising. Perfectly targeted advertising could be quite useful -- and, in fact, that's the holy grail that advertisers always talk about. The problem, though, is that most personalized advertising isn't that well targeted, and it's reaching the point that it makes people rather uncomfortable.

Last week all the attention was on Phorm, the former adware company, now trying to work with ISPs to use your clickstream data to target ads better. While the company is aggressively defending its practices, it clearly makes people somewhat uncomfortable -- and all of the hubbub about the story has resulted in at least one ISP partner of Phorm to decide that it will only offer the program on an opt-in basis. That sounds good, though, as Broadband Reports notes, Phorm competitor NebuAd had promised that any of its ISP partners would clearly let customers know what it was doing with its targeted advertisements, and that doesn't appear to be happening.

All this has lead the NY Times to write an article about how much data is being tracked about you in order to target ads better. There's nothing particularly new or surprising (hopefully) in that article, but an even more interesting question is raised by the same author in a separate blog post, where she went and asked Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL if they could create advertisements that incorporated the user's name in the advertisement as an attempt to personalize it. The answers are quite interesting, with very different levels of "could" and "would" responses from the various participants.

But the real issue with such ads are that they may be getting quite close to that "uncanny valley" of advertising. When the ads on a random page start saying "Hi, Mike, we think you'd like..." it reaches that level where it throws in your face just how much data is being collected about you, and I'd imagine that makes people quite uncomfortable. In some ways, this is part of what made people so damn uncomfortable with Facebook's Beacon program. It was making use of data in a very public way for supposedly more "personalized" ads. However, they ended up in that "creepy" valley between not very personalized and perfectly personalized where the ad is actually effective. For companies working on better ad targeting and more personalized ads, it's going to pay to be aware of this issue going forward.