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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
Ofc it could have been benign, but there is no evidence that it was, while conversely everything that we currently know points to a breach of ethics.
One, they did not fully disclose that a camera was even there (unless I am mixing up this story with another one just like it?). That also makes it impossible to...
Two, they did not obtain proper (or any) consent. A banking ATM that needs to use your face to verify your identity could be an example of a benign use, and ignoring the enormous potential security implications of that atm, it could do so with a popup on the screen "Do you consent to having your face observed?", "Do you consent to storage of your facial data in our database?", "Do you consent to us selling the marketing data we collect from analysis of your facial data?". They did none of this.
Three, when asked about it, they lied. Technically they obfuscated the truth, which is just another way of stating that they lied.
Ofc it COULD have been benign, but so far they are zero out of three already towards that end - and that is even from just what we know so far.