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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.
Stanley sounded alarm after consulting Invenda sales brochures that promised "the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders" of every person who used the machines without ever requesting consent.
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.
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.
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.
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why do people think it's okay to do this shit? if you're coding facial recognition for a vending machine, that's like 80 steps too far down the capitalism ladder
if you took this machine back to the 1920s and told people what it was doing, they'd shoot at it. and probably you
80 steps too far down the capitalism ladder
This is the result of capitalism - corporations (aka the rich selfish assholes running them) will always attempt to do horrible things to earn more money, so long as they can get away with it, and only perhaps pay relatively small fines. The people who did this face no jailtime, face no real consequences - this is what unregulated capitalism brings. Corporations should not have rights or protect the people who run them - the people who run them need to face prison and personal consequences. (edited for spelling and missing word)
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"over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians" were scanned into Cadillac Fairview's database
fully scanned facially by automated kiosks in malls.. the database was deleted only after an investigation..
The students should get together and jack the machine away into their hacking club and do some reverse engineering, so that we get more information on how the data collection worked as opposed to just trusting the company's statements. If a hacking group like the German Chaos Computer Club got behind this, they could release their findings while keeping the perpetrators anonymous. However, I’m pretty sure the machine is just a frontend to a server, which got shut down as soon as the students complained, with no GDPR-like checkout being available in the jurisdiction.
Vending machine in the Amazon warehouse in MN just had a camera taking pictures also. Fucking weird ass rich people/corps. A person was behind this decision and that face needs to be woken up with a punch everyday....
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After that, set the thing on fire and throw it in the manufacturers office
When you start tinkering with a machine learning model of any kind, you’re probably going to find some interesting edge cases the model can’t handle correctly. Maybe there’s a specific face that has an unexpected effect on the device. What if you could find a way to cheese a discount out of it or something?
Imagine a racist vending machine. The face recognition system think this customer is black with 81% confidence. Let's increase the price of grape soda! Oh look, a 32 year old white woman (79% confidence). Better raise the price of diet coke!
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“Where Cadillac Fairview was ultimately forced to delete the entire database, “
LOL yeah right.
“OK BUBBA! WE DONE DEE-LEETED THE ENTIRE THANG!!”
Bollocks.
They probably gave the ‘enforcement’ agency a blank hard drive and said “Well, gee, shucks. That’s all we had!”
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I love how vending machines run windows now
Tons of Point of Sale terminals run Windows instead of Linux for some reason, probably because the software they run is only written for Windows.
Makes sense, but a vending machine shouldn't need a fully fledged OS in the first place imo
I don't get it either. What do vending machines need to be computerized for at all? What was wrong with the old kind that was around for decades where you put your money in, pushed a button, and stuff came out? I certainly can't think of a reason for a vending machine to have a camera. That's nuts.
It's 2024, most people don't carry cash, and the whole world runs on automation. These kinds of vending machines are completely over the top, but it's actually a pretty bad idea to not use computers for this application. Just knowing when machines need to be refilled remotely saves more money than such an implementation would cost.
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As if Linux based vending machines aint a full fledged OS even with a minimal installation?
This aint embedded.
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Just imagine the license fees.
That's why the need facial recognition, to sell the data to pay for licensing fees.
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To the people that allowed that gross invasion to happen:
Oopsie woopsie, diddums make a widdle fucky wucky? Yes you did. Yes you did.
Then do what you'd do to any other child: take away the toy they misbehaved with.
Hmm.... facial recognition vending machine huh....
Finally it's time for my jammer & some script from c/netsec to shine
"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.
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.
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?)
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"Why do you need fingerprint reader?"
"To recognize when someone touches the vending machine."
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Reddit post sparked an investigation from a fourth-year student named River Stanley, who was writing for a university publication called MathNEWS.
Where Cadillac Fairview was ultimately forced to delete the entire database, Stanley wrote that consequences for collecting similarly sensitive facial recognition data without consent for Invenda clients like Mars remain unclear.
Stanley's report ended with a call for students to demand that the university "bar facial recognition vending machines from campus."
Some students claimed on Reddit that they attempted to cover the vending machine cameras while waiting for the school to respond, using gum or Post-it notes.
The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface—never taking or storing images of customers."
It was only after closing a $7 million funding round, including deals with Mars and other major clients like Coca-Cola, that Invenda could push for expansive global growth that seemingly vastly expands its smart vending machines' data collection and surveillance opportunities.
The original article contains 806 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The first question that came to my mind was - A M&M vending machine?. The the actual fuck society
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Those any combination coca cola machines have cameras on them.
Time to hack the vending machine snd delete all the partitions off of it and render it unusable
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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