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.

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.

Wait-they'll shoot me at the machine??

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.

Still not ok.

Not everybody who approaches the machine or walks past it is really consenting to their appearance being logged and analysed though - not to mention that "we don't store data" is only true if the security is effective and no exploits manage to weaponise the camera now staring back at you as you try to make a purchase.

Ultimately vending machines are completely passive sales anyway, the collection of demographic data about who is buying from the machine are a little useless because it's not like the machine can work on its closing techniques for coin based candy sales.

If you don't have access to the source code then you don't know what it's doing. If there's economic incentives to take my picture and tie my face to my name then I'm going to assume "trust us, it's anonymous" means "we buy and sell your data" (at least).

If you'll grant there are people in power who would want a surveillance state and businesses routinely sell data to governments then you don't get to dismiss this out of hand. We have to draw the line somewhere, even if marketing people with a stalker mentally don't see the line.