Surveillance Tech Is an Open Secret at CES 2020
Companies like Cyberlink and ZeroKey proudly showcased products that could track people and objects
CES targets a strange place between consumers and businesses. Vendors may want to advertise a product that customers will see on store shelves, but just as often they’re selling services directly to businesses.
When it comes to user privacy, those two categories require very different marketing approaches.
While consumer-facing tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook came to CES prepared to assuage user fears about the erosion of privacy — even if some did a less than convincing job — this year a number of vendors at the annual electronics trade show couldn’t have been more excited to sell the futuristic surveillance dystopia they’re helping to build.
Take, for example, Cyberlink, a company best known to consumers for making video-editing software like PowerDirector and PowerDVD. But at CES, Cyberlink was showing off a very different product: facial recognition software. The company says its FaceMe product is capable of recognizing faces in a video, identifying a person’s gender and rough age range, and even what emotions they’re expressing.
