this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Why the hell does a vending machine need a facial recognition camera to "activate the purchasing interface"?
There should just be a set of buttons to select what you want and a window so you can see what items are available.
That is incredibly invasive of people’s privacy what the fuck
Welcome to 2024, privacy no longer exists, your face is sellable and you being poor is exploitable, enjoy your stay
Freedom costs ~~a buck 'o five~~ your personal data.
So they can sell it.
Yup it's for "advertising" say for example the Army wants to know which areas have the most fighting aged men. So posters and recruiters know where to hang out. (this is the most extreme example.)
Vending machine company sells facial recognition and temporal location data to a data broker who enriches it to enhance identifiability and this data is sold to a stalker who uses it to murder people. That’s a more extreme, but certainly not most extreme, example.
I saw some posts about a similar technology in the meetings and events industry: a company is selling "facial analysis" not "facial recognition." They try to get around privacy laws by saying "well our technology does scan every single face it sees, but it doesn't store that image, it just determines age, gender, race and emotional sentiment and adjusts tallies for those categories in a database."
It's still information gathering I didn't consent to while attending a conference, and it's a camera with the potential to be hacked.
Of course it's always about marketing and advertising. They want to have a heat map of which areas are popular and at what times. In the case of events so they can sell to sponsors and exhibitors. In this university it's less clear. Do the vending machines have a space to sell ads? That would be my guess.
Because people are dumb. If the machine knows when someone is looking at it, it can stop doing whatever it does to try and get your attention, and put itself in “sales mode”.
Still, you’re right. It seems like an overly complicated and expensive solution. Old-fashioned vending machines did the job just fine.
And notify somewhere that Snickers is out. Then add a camera and a firmware update...