this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Now I'm curious if this would actually be a viable business model, if it'd have any legal or practical issues, and if anyone already does it. Like, there exist companies that collect trash already, clearly that part is already viable, so if information could be collected and sold to advertisers for even a little more than the cost to collect that information, then it would be extra profit for the trash company as long as it didn't negatively impact their core business of trash collection. Could be even more insidious and hard to opt out of than actually having someone look through one's individual trash too, for example, if one could, say, sort out the cans from the trash for recycling purposes, one might also try to have a machine look for brand logos on those cans, and store information about which route a given load came from, potentially giving information about what kinds of beverages people in a given neighborhood are more or less likely to buy.
Those were my thoughts when I saw Gates bought waste managment stocks and saw the video of AI successfully sorting the items for recycling.
It's interesting to think about. Banks can track where a person buys and how much is spent. Individual businesses gather data on customers in various ways that bigger corporations can pay to look at. But there's only so much one business sees. And they might not want to share that in the first place.
Scanning trash for logos, barcodes etc can give you nice "average consumer" stats for an area without paying a bunch of companies. It doesn't matter if a bottle of sunscreen came from a small business, walmart or bought online direct, they'll know people in your area bought it and used it.
Hell, if you're scanning the trash for cans to separate out and recycle, why not just scan all the rest of the trash and figure out whatever information you can from there. You could realistically scan all the trash and log every identifiable piece while only removing cans and logging all the data. Don't know how much valuable information one could pull from this data that isn't already available through sales data, but it's an interesting concept to mull over at least.
Dunno about selling ads, but rooting through people's garbage is a massively important part of archaeology/anthropology!
It's also an important part of preparing for a hack, the discoveries in the garbage are used for social engineering, which is used for hacking. See the movie Sneakers for a great example.