Those any combination coca cola machines have cameras on them.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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"facial recognition exe" doesn't say anything about a "face image database" as this post title claims.
What the hell else could they be doing with the data? Scanning a face without a database is absolutely pointless.
The linked article tells you: Recognize when someone stands in front of the vending machine.
"the data" is interpreted. Not stored or matched.
I assert that this tech is biased towards bears and racoons.
"Why do you need fingerprint reader?"
"To recognize when someone touches the vending machine."
Sure that's their claim but they're not asking 'why have that type of tech anyways'.
If it's supposed to just act as a motion sensor, we've had those for decades. None of which needed to register if it was a face or not. Why isn't the purchasing interface just always there, why is it an interface, and why is it not just a button that says press to start...
Why is there a computer in there that's been trained on how to recognize what a face is in order to open up a purchasing interface. What would be the point of investing that much research and development if it was just doing something that could have been accomplished in the '90s with tech that you could have bought it radio shack.
From the side of someone who works heavily in data analysis and application databases I can tell you it would be very, very easy to see if it was just a front end application using the data or storing it in a database. There are use cases for both setups, absolutely, but a cursory examination of the machine in question would make it abundantly clear which it was doing.
Article says "the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders" so it's not recognizing individuals, but perhaps adjusting the sales pitch for who it sees walking by.
(But it's a collage campus, so most students will be around the same age. Maybe it pitches different things to teachers?)
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.
Time to hack the vending machine snd delete all the partitions off of it and render it unusable
Why bother hacking it? Just destroy it.
Yeah but this is the University of Waterloo we're talking about here. This hit Canadian mainstream media CTV News so I know that. Also for an university specializing in Engineering and Mathematics there's a shit ton of cameras around
Also, I'm not sure if this is the same in Canada as the US, but I'm pretty sure that in many cases, vandalism is considered a much lesser crime than unauthorized computer tampering/hacking
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