this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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I'd doubt it's collecting or transmitting much. It's probably just estimating age, sex, race etc. and using it to decide which promotion to put on screen. It's possibly collecting these to determine what type of people use the machine. Similar to those billboards in shopping centres.
Storing each individual to recognize later or identify online seems like a stretch.
If it did have a user bio database, it would be centralised and not on the machine itself.
I think the problem is that it is storing the user faces, at all. If it were simple identifying each person's characteristics there would be no reason to save that data for later. Also, apparently the company advertises that the machine does transmit this data for estimating age and gender for every purchase.
That's your claim though. They are storing "male, 24" and that's it, no face. Of course they could be lying and actually are storing faces, but it doesn't look like it. And it's also perfectly valid to object to them storing even "male, 24".
Still not ok.