I’ve seen vending machines with cameras 10 years ago at least. Allegedly to prevent people from shaking and pivoting them so that the goods drop. Which people did. And started doing less once the cameras appeared. However, at that time, the message that “you are being recorded” was printed quite clearly on the front of the vending machine. Not mentioning that seems unlawful to me.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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I feel like the solution is wearing fur suits and daftpunk style helmets every where. I'm okay with this.
People be lookin at the camera with masks on like:
The solution is definitely to spray paint, or tape over the camera.
Yes, but no one noticed until the the stupid obvious error message.
Have you seen the camera? They intentionally hid it as well.
Looks like someone drilled a hole with a pocket knife and put a camera in.
Shady shit.
even without the extreme privacy invasion, nobody needs back talk from a vending machine
So I may be reading too far into this, but does this machine check your age and ethnicity to work out how much you might be willing to pay for M&Ms then charge you that much?
According to the article, it's done for market research, i.e. finding out who buys what, which is a thing businesses like to know. But also apparently it allows the machine to generate "AI-powered production recommendations", which i guess means it tailors reccomendations to each user? Which it can do because it has a touch screen, and the touch screen itself already strikes me as full of shit.
That's what the article says this machine in particular does; but yes, it could totally change the price on you depending on what you look like, and all other kinds of deeply shady things. You can count on a private company to do that kind of thing and then use their favorite argument: it's technically legal.
they might not have been trying to use the data at the point of sale right away, but having a database of their customer's faces would be valuable to them for plenty of marketing type reasons
It's always big data, isn't it?
it all ends up in a spreadsheet somewhere
It's all just one giant spreadsheet?
🔫 Always has been
✨AI✨
The company's documentation says it's for detecting when people walk by so it can turn on the screen. Because apparently a good old fashioned motion sensor wasn't good enough...
That doesn't explain the demographic profiling though.
A motion sensor would get tripped by anything that passes by, but even so, a basic image processing algorithm designed just to detect whether that thing is a human or not would be more than sufficient, there's no need to identify specific people by face.