A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial recognition technology::A photo shared on Reddit showed one of the vending machines with an error code suggesting it used facial recognition tech.
I’m surprised nobody has discussed the most obvious “marketing” use of this data: Differential pricing.
Someone walks up to the machine. Based on the image seen by the machine, they determine which product is most likely to sell, and bump that product’s price up by a quarter or 50 cents.
If they’re not doing it now, they’re preparing to do it in the near future.
EDIT If you watch Invenda’s marketing videos, they talk about how the ‘optical sensor’ provides a ‘bespoke purchasing experience.’
Sounds exactly like dynamic pricing is their model.
Alternatively, I have seen the vending machines with giant screens on the front that play ads for different drinks. Perhaps they will use it for advertising decisions as well.
That’s my assumption as well. Man in a suit checks out the machine? Bump it up. Couple checks out? Bump it up.
On the one hand, I can totally understand that there is a difference between recognizing a face and recognizing your face. Algorithms that recognize a face are really easy to implement now.
On the other hand, though, why should a vending machine need to recognize a face? So it shuts off it’s lighting when no one is looking at it? I’m not sure if there is any practical benefit besides some project manager justifying a new feature with buzzword-compliant tech.
I believe the company when they say there is nothing problematic here, but they deserve the bad press for thinking it would be a good idea in the first place.
Of note, it’d be pretty easy to push an OTA software update to have it go from recognizing a face to recognizing your face
Lesson learned: don’t name your surveillance tool EvilFaceRecognition.exe
How about totallylegitfacerecognition.exe?
“Don’t be evil”
We got a phishing campaign at work awhile back with an attachment named “OktaAccountStealer.pdf”
… I was impressed. What I really want to know is how many people opened it anyway.
They do shit like that on purpose. Someone who is aware enough to read the names of attachments probably won’t fall for the rest of their scam. Its a filter to make sure they don’t waste their effort on anyone other than the most gullible.
It’s funny how much I love cyberpunk fiction but how much I hate cyberpunk reality. Now if the vending machine becomes sentient? Then we are good, until then I guess fuck these guys?
I’ll gladly welcome the sentient machines if they can make me a sandwich now and then
I wasn’t against the idea of using facial recognition (age/gender) to do things like recommend products, where I first saw it in Japan on train station vending machines.
The difference is that in my example the camera was in a very obvious spot, here it seems it is covertly collecting facial recognition data, and users weren’t aware it was happening until a student noticed this error.
Glad the college I went to is too cheap for these fancy things. Their vending machines are just barely smart enough to use tap pay, and by barely I sometimes it doesn’t even work.
A solution in search of a problem. They didn’t need that tech for a payment interface.
No, but they need it to dynamically adjust pricing based on customer demographics.
Do they actually dynamically adjust pricing? Or is thst just fear mongering over technology?
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