Billboards learning to recognize the age and gender of passersby

Another sci-fi trope has come to life, unsurprisingly, in Japan, where digital billboards now discern the gender and age of passersby and adapt their messages accordingly. According to a spokesman for this project, "The camera can distinguish a person's sex and approximate age ... if he or she looks at the screen for a second." The plan is to progress to interactive advertisements if this project catches on. Now we're moving into sci-fi stuff I've written, which is really scary. Connections to Spielberg's Minority Report are being made, and not kindly, but honestly, Facebook has been tailoring its ads in a similar way for a while now. They rely on user feedback to determine which ads to display, but the principle is the same and, in a lower-tech way, it's just as creepy and invasive. But since advertisers will spare no expense to pester us night and day, this is really more of a gradual shift than observers realize. That doesn't make being read like a barcode by ads in public thoroughfares any more welcome, though.