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Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim — but growing — chance the ad is watching you too.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don’t shift based on which people are watching, the technology’s ability to determine the viewers’ demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they’re reaching their target audience.

While the technology remains in limited use for now, advertising industry analysts say it is finally beginning to live up to its promise. The manufacturers say their systems can accurately determine gender 85 to 90 percent of the time, while accuracy for the other measures continues to be refined.

The concept is reminiscent of the science-fiction movie “Minority Report,” in which Tom Cruise’s character enters a mall and finds that retinal scanners identify him and prompt personalized ads that greet him by name.

But this technology doesn’t go nearly that far. It doesn’t identify people individually — it simply categorizes them by outward appearances.

So a video screen might show a motorcycle ad for a group of men, but switch to a minivan ad when women and children join them, said Vicki Rabenou, the chief measurement officer of Tampa, Fla.-based TruMedia Technologies Inc., one of the leaders in developing the technology.

“This is proactive merchandising,” Rabenou said. “You’re targeting people with smart ads.”

Because the tracking industry is still in its infancy, there isn’t yet consensus on how to refer to the technology. Some call it face reading, face counting, gaze tracking or, more generally, face-based audience measurement.

Whatever it’s called, advertisers are finally ready to try it, said advertising consultant Jack Sullivan, a senior vice president of Starcom USA in Chicago. “I think you’re going to see a lot of movement toward it by the end of this year in the top 10 markets,” he said.

Because face tracking might feel reminiscent of Big Brother, manufacturers are racing to offer reassurances. When the systems capture an image of who’s watching the screen, a computer instantly analyzes it. The systems’ manufacturers insist, however, that nothing is ever stored and no identifying information is ever associated with the pictures. That makes the system less intrusive than a surveillance camera that records what it sees, the developers say.

The idea still worries Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group in San Francisco. Tien said it’s not enough to say some system is “not as bad as some other technology,” and argues that cameras that study people contribute to an erosion of privacy.

In general, the tracking systems work like this: A sensor or camera in or near the screen identifies viewers’ faces by picking up shapes, colors and the relative speed of movement. The concept is similar to the way consumer cameras now can automatically make sure faces are in focus.

When the ad system pinpoints a face, it compares shapes and patterns to faces that are already identified in a database as male or female. That lets the system predict the person’s gender almost immediately.

“The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows,” said Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, a French company that is another player in face-tracking technology. Others include Studio IMC Inc. in New York.

The companies say their systems have become adept at determining a viewer’s gender, but age is trickier: The software can categorize age only in broad ranges — teens, younger to middle-aged folks and seniors. There’s moderate demand for ads based on ethnic information, but the companies acknowledge that determining ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out gender and age range.

Prandoni provided The Associated Press a limited version of Quividi’s software, which uses an ordinary webcam to stream video to a computer. The trial version tracked gender only, using color-coded circles to distinguish male and female faces.

The sample size was too small to be statistically significant, but it was accurate about 80 to 90 percent of the time.

That might be as precise as the systems ever get, said Deborah Mitchell, a professor of consumer psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even the human brain can’t always determine gender, age or ethnicity.

Still, “even if it gets to 70 percent accuracy, that’s still giving you a wealth of information,” said Mitchell, who teaches in the Wisconsin School of Business.

That information is certainly valuable to Bill Ketcham, the chief marketing officer of Adspace Networks Inc. His New York company sells video advertising on 1,400 video screens at 105 malls around the nation.

Adspace is testing six TruMedia systems at malls in Winston-Salem, N.C., Pittsburgh and St. Louis. The kiosks display a daily list of top 10 sales at the mall, as well as paid advertising that comes largely from movie studios and TV networks.

A 15-second video ad that replays across Adspace’s national network can cost as much as $765,000 per month. So advertisers expect rigorous information about who sees the spots — information that face tracking can now provide, Ketcham said.

For now, at least, Adspace isn’t changing the ads based on who’s watching — Ketcham said the kiosks’ audiences are so large that it wouldn’t be practical to personalize ads to individuals.

While advertisers like the face-tracking technology, another privacy advocate, Harley Geiger, questions whether it should be used on consumers without their knowledge. Geiger, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., said advertisers should be telling consumers what details about them are being collected and for what purpose.

“With the technology proliferating, now or the short-term is the time to consider privacy protections,” he said. “If you don’t build it in at an early stage it becomes very difficult to build it into an already established system.”

Visit any electronics store and it’s clear that flat-screen TVs are among their best sellers — and that they hope consumers continue a years-long tradition of upgrading their home entertainment systems for the Super Bowl.

Many large TVs are energy hogs, however, and California regulators want to get the biggest offenders off store shelves.

The California Energy Commission is expected to adopt rules this summer requiring retailers by 2011 to sell only TVs that meet guidelines of the federal Energy Star program, which is generally voluntary. The proposal includes labeling that tells California buyers how much of their utility bill goes to powering their flat-screen.

“That’s one of the things nobody even talks about,” said Doug Pongrazc, a chef who was shopping for a flat-screen TV recently at a Best Buy store in the Sacramento area. “How much electricity do these things suck up?”

TV dealers are warning that consumers will simply buy their sets online if they can’t find the models they want in California stores. The rules would be the country’s first mandatory energy standards for televisions and would further tighten in 2013.

California utilities and environmental groups say the rules will play a key role in reducing electricity use as consumers buy larger TVs and bars and restaurants install more flat-screens to draw customers. Serving a population of nearly 38 million, California’s uneven energy supplies often result in threats of blackouts on the hottest days.

“In the old days, it was easy to look around the house and see that a refrigerator was the dominant guzzler,” said Art Rosenfeld, a California energy commissioner who pioneered the state’s appliance standards in the early 1970s. “TVs alone are now 10 percent of a household’s use.”

Including cable boxes, game consoles, speakers, DVD players and digital video recorders, a premium entertainment system can consume nearly $200 worth of electricity each year, according to the energy commission, though most households pay much less. The average cost of powering a single TV for a year ranges from $35 to $75, said Adam Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Energy Commission.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., California’s largest utility and a major backer of the standards, says home electronics ought be part of the state’s energy conservation efforts.

“We want people to have the entertainment they want, the kind of things that make life better, but there’s a way to do it smartly,” said Duane Larson, director of customer energy efficiency at PG&E. “It’s much more cost-efficient to have (companies) make energy-efficient products than it is to site and build power plants that will also have environmental impacts.”

The average plasma TV uses more than three times as much energy as an old cathode-ray tube set, and a 48-inch plasma TV can draw more power than a large refrigerator — even if the set is used only a few hours a day, California regulators said.

Liquid-crystal display, or LCD, TVs guzzle a little less — about 43 percent more energy than tube sets, according to a study by PG&E. LCDs now account for about 90 percent of the 4 million TVs sold in California annually.

Rear-projection TVs, which fall between LCDs and plasmas in energy use, also would be covered by the new standards.

Retailers and manufacturers say many newer flat-screen TVs use less power than tube sets, noting that 100 available models already go beyond the standards California wants to reach by 2013. The problem is that the best-quality screens use the most electricity.

Industry leaders also say the proposed standards threaten to limit consumer choice, drive shoppers to the Internet and put specialty retailers out of business. Nearly a quarter of all flat-screen TVs — and all but one plasma TV on the market today — would not be allowed for sale in California once the rules are fully implemented, according to the Plasma Display Coalition.

“It’s setting a limit that many TVs that are larger and more fully featured could not meet,” said Doug Johnson, a technology expert at the Consumer Electronics Association. “It appears to be an effort to really regulate entertainment, not energy use.”

Manufacturers say California should stick with voluntary programs. Energy Star, launched for televisions in November, already is driving competition for energy-efficient TVs nationwide, they say.

Independent retailers, who sell mostly high-end, big-screen TVs, say their customers will shop elsewhere if California adopts the TV standards, and industry experts say the state could lose between $87 million and $130 million in annual sales and income tax revenue right away.

“Customers who come in to my store have already done their research,” said Leon Soohoo, owner of Paradyme Sound and Vision, a Sacramento electronics retailer. “My fear is if they ban these desirable television sets from the California market, I am out of that business. But yet it doesn’t stop the trade because people can still buy on the Internet or from out-of-state retailers.”

A new study has revealed that children these days spend increasing amounts of their lives in watching television and playing video games, cramming about six hours of screen time a day, and this online activity is building barriers between parents and children.

More than a third of the study participants, five- to 16-year-olds, said that they just could not live without their computers.

The authors of the study have revealed that children are increasingly turning their rooms into multimedia hubs comprising games consoles, internet access and MP3 players.

The study revealed that girls in particular were likely to chat online to their friends at night, and 38 per cent would take a console to bed instead of a book.

Kids whose parents had banned TV sets from their bedrooms justified Internet access on the basis that it would help with homework, but the latest from market research agency ChildWise showed that such children were more likely to socialise than do homework online.

About 30 per cent said that they had a blog, while 62 per cent had a profile on a social networking site.

The researchers revealed that their report was based on an annual survey, presently into its 15th year, of 1,800 children at 92 schools across the country.

“This year has seen a major boost to the intensity and the independence with which children approach online activities,” the Guardian quoted the study report as saying.

While spending time before TV and computer screens seems to have turned children skilled managers of their free time, book reading is falling out of favour.

The report suggests that 84 per cent children read for pleasure in 2006, 80 per cent in 2007, and 74 per cent 2008.

“The internet has moved to a whole new level. They are watching the same amount of TV but there is a change in the way children communicate and get their information. It’s so clear that a lot of children are fluent communicators but not in a conventional way. They aren’t readers, they are reliant on spellchecks,” said Rosemary Duff, ChildWise’s research director.

“They are a generation abandoning print and paper, and the whole integration of technology and the way they glide from one to the other is seamless. They will be surfing the net, talking to a friend and downloading a track simultaneously. It’s hard for the older generation to understand what’s going on with their children because they communicate in a completely different way,” Rosemary added.

Duff further said: “38% of nine- to 14-year-old girls take the games console to bed at night. That is the age group of girls who used to be the most avid readers. Now they have a media hub in their rooms.”

The Vatican will soon have its own channel on the video sharing site YouTube where the Catholic faithful or the curious will be able to see Pope Benedict or Church events, a Vatican source said on Saturday.

The details of the accord are due to be presented on Friday at a news conference attended by Vatican officials as well as Henrique de Castro, managing director of media solutions for Google, which owns YouTube.

The initiative will involve Google, the Vatican Television Center and Vatican Radio.

It will mark the Vatican’s deepest plunge into new media. The Vatican opened up its website, www.vatican.va, in 1995.

The number of registered users to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s personal video blog passed 3,500 Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman said here.

The Russian president has had a video blog on the Kremlin site since the autumn of 2008, but visitors who register may now leave their own comments. The interactive service on the president’s personal web-page was launched Monday.

‘As of 5 p.m., 3,519 people had registered on the website, and 168 were refused registration due to the blog’s rules,’ the spokesman said. ‘Another 443 are waiting for confirmation of their registration.’

Comments are only accepted in Russian and visitors could be denied access if they use abusive or foul language, or words that could promote hatred or discrimination towards minority groups or minors.

Visitors may also be denied access if they attempt to use the site for commercial or advertising purposes. Comments will be edited before being published to avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes, the site said.

In order to leave a comment on the president’s personal video blog, visitors have to register with the official Kremlin site. The registration process requires users to provide a screen name as well as their name, age, education, e-mail address and the country or region where they live.

By Tuesday evening, there were 603 comments left on the site and another 132 were waiting to be edited, the spokesman said. There are 10 employees who handle the traffic on the president’s website.

The president’s press secretary, Natalya Timakova, said the president planned to respond to some of the comments.

‘Some of the more interesting comments left may be answered by the president himself,’ Timakova told RIA Novosti.

Medvedev has promoted the use of computers and Internet in schools throughout Russia, and has three computer screens on his desk in his Kremlin office.

Social networking website Facebook has been accused of giving support to convicted Italian mobsters by enabling them to make and maintain their own pages from their cells.

Mafia investigators have revealed that Facebook features profiles of some of the most notorious mafiosi, jailed for crimes ranging from extortion to brutal murders.

They are concerned that such mafia bosses are increasingly becoming online idols, with thousands of fans posting messages of support and lauding them for their gruesome past. Salvatore ”the Beast” Riina, 78, is said to have over 2,000 subscribers to his Facebook profile, with supporters praising him as a “great” man, and wishing him a Merry Christmas.

The delinquent, who has been behind bars since 1993, was renowned for his cruelty as the ”boss of bosses” of the Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra. He is currently serving twelve life sentences for murder, but is believed to still direct mafia activities from inside prison.

His successor Bernardo Provenzano, who currently heads the Sicilian mafia, is also said to have a Facebook profile, with fans honouring “someone who tricked the state for 40 years” and others calling for him to be made a saint.

The presence of their influence on the Internet has outraged relatives of the mobsters” victims, and one of Italy’’s most senior anti-mafia investigators has said that anyone who signs up to the Facebook sites should be investigated.

“With the exception of a small minority of macabre pranksters, these people represent potential mobsters. They belong to the so-called grey zone of people willing to support the bosses and the mafia,” the Telegraph quoted Carlo Vizzini, a member of Italy’’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission, as saying.

Another member of the anti-mafia commission, Giampiero D”Alia, said: “We need to prevent mafia and criminal infiltration of the internet and force Facebook to clear the social network of those who put themselves at the disposition of mafia bosses.”

The police, though keeping tabs on Facebook, say that no laws are being broken by people who post messages in praise of mafia gangsters, and that they could only act if supporters posted opinions that could be construed as racial hatred.

A Facebook spokesman told the Ansa news agency: “Facebook is a platform for online discussion and mirrors conversations that take place offline such as on the telephone or via email.

He added: “As such we often see comments, debates and discussions but nevertheless this sort of controversy is not enough of a reason to remove a group or pages from the site.”