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.

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.

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.

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)

In the article is a sound explanation: the machine is activated by detecting a human face looking at the display.

If this face recognition software only decides "face" or "not face" and does not store any data, I'm pretty sure this setup will be compatible with any data protection law.

OTOH they claim that these machines provide statistics about age and gender of customers. So they are obviously recognising more than just "face yes". Still – if the data stored is just a statistics on age and gender and no personalised data, I'm pretty sure it still complies even with 1920s data protection habits.

I'm pretty sure that this would be GDPR conform, too, as long as the customer is informed, e.g. by including this info in the terms of service.

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?

After that, set the thing on fire and throw it in the manufacturers office

Why are you caricaturing Canadians as Hillbillies? They didn't even apologize once, this is totally unbelievable.

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.

Just imagine the license fees.

What the hell else could they be doing with the data? Scanning a face without a database is absolutely pointless.

Time for me big sledgehammer to shine

Still not ok.

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.