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A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial recognition technology
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Based on the quotes from the vending company, at first I thought this was just a dumb way to detect when a human is standing there. But it’s worse than that.
So first we get this from a company representative:
Ok, fine. Overkill, but fine. But then their company’s FAQ tells us this:
So they ARE collecting data, and they are trying to obfuscate that fact by saying they are just “activating the purchasing interface”. This isn’t just turning on a lighted display when a person is standing there. “Activating the purchasing interface” means activating the algorithms to analyze my appearance. They are trying to figure out who is buying their product. That’s different.
So they are being shady about their true intentions. They aren’t being up front, and they expect us to trust that they aren’t storing or transmitting anything other than estimated age and sex. Hmm, maybe. But their actions don’t build trust.
Plus, now I have to worry about VENDING MACHINES getting hacked and being used as surveillance devices now too?? Can I just buy a candy bar without being reminded we live in a dystopia?
To be fair that is perfectly valid and benign data to collect to determine what demographics use your service.
I'm sure this is going to be controversial on here though but when you build a service or a device it's usually pretty valuable to know who uses it in order to determine what features to work on next or how to change it.
Of course the ability for them to abuse it is quite high and it would be difficult to trust them not to transmit more information than they're supposed to
You don’t need to add features to a vending machine though, it just needs to take currency in exchange for snacks and drinks. Any metrics of what sells better/worse can be done by watching inventory like we’ve done all of commercial history. They’re over complicating this for no valid reason
It's not just what sells, but who buys what. "Demographic X buys this one product more than others so how can we advertise this product to them where they will see it?" Growth is their "valid" reason, you know, like malignant cancer cells.