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Students Horrified When Error Message Appears on Vending Machine, Revealing Something Dark (Facial Recognition) (futurism.com)

submitted 8 months ago by stefenauris@pawb.social to c/tech@pawb.social

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Oh this is just too messed up..now vending machines have cameras in them?

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 10 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] cobra89 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

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...

Edit: thought about this for another few seconds. It was probably so they could slap "AI" onto it for marketing.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 6 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] Tathar@pawb.social 3 points 8 months ago

That doesn't explain the demographic profiling though.

[–] theodewere@kbin.social 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's always big data, isn't it?

[–] theodewere@kbin.social 4 points 8 months ago

it all ends up in a spreadsheet somewhere

[–] BOLOID@pawb.social 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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 product 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.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 8 months ago

It mentioned targeted discounts based on demographic, which sounds to be like pricing things based on demographic.

If the data is local and stays on the machine, I'm guessing they mean the face data. They are probably sending the data about what demographics buy what things at what price point to feed to other machines.