A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial-recognition technology
businessinsider.com
- The University of Waterloo is expected to remove smart vending machines from its campus.
- A student discovered an error code that suggested the machines used facial-recognition technology.
- Vending Services said the technology didn't take or store customers' photos.
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Is there any rational reason why vending machines need to be that complicated?
Card readers / contactless payment were easy enough to "bolt on" to existing models (they had them when I was in college back in the stone age). So that's not a sufficient reason.
There are some "new" features I find useful, such as detecting when an item fails to vend. But those are pretty much just IR "tripwires" that detect the falling product; if it doesn't trip, then you get refunded or can make another selection.
I just cannot fathom why vending machines need any of this extra crap.
Feel free to enlighten me if you're in the know.
It might be advertisements. Some newer gas stations/grocery stores have ads playing on the refrigerated section and when it detects someone on front of the door it will go clear or show a picture of what's behind the door.
It's completely ridiculous but it's where things are going now.
We desperately need a CALM Act, but for the visual medium. Ugh. Things have been out of hand for too long now.
I fully agree. We're bombarded with enough distractions throughout the day. We don't need more right in front of our faces while we're trying to do chores.
The search for More Money
Space Balls 2
But when was now?
SOON!
Accounts tied to school ID card? That way you can’t steal someone’s and use theirs, just polls a database and correlates your picture to your id image or something.
About the only use case I can think of for a school.
At least in the case covered by the article, they don't appear to be doing that:
Still possible if they're being less-than-perfectly-honest in that statement, they invest more into the technology or with another machine/company somewhere else.
::: spoiler 1
That statement sounds weasely as fuck.
The technology in that specific machine cannot identify a user, does not mean the machine does no store or transmit the footage to be processed on another machine or system that can.
The linked article includes this statement from Invenda, the manufacturer of the machines. Still have to rely on their truthfulness but they do address that specific point.
Makes sense why the machine owner would seek this information either for their own use or to sell to others in related fields. Maybe they can use it combined with records of product sales (vs. a very literal form of window-shopping) to identify areas more likely than others to bring consistent returns on the investment of placing, stocking and servicing the machines based on the age/gender statistics of nearby population centers.
Doesn't mean I'd want to be part of their dataset or would be comfortable allowing their installation in a facility where that decision was up to me though.
Need? No. It sounds like it did two things: light up when it sensed a person, and also collect age, gender, and other demographic data and send it back to the company.