They need to recognize a face because they explicitly state in their FAQ they are estimating purchasers’ age and sex. This isn’t just adjusting lighting. I would not be so quick to say there is nothing problematic here. I’m highly skeptical.
Based on the quotes from the vending company, at first I thought this was just a dumb way to detect when a human is standing there. But it’s worse than that.
So first we get this from a company representative:
The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface
Ok, fine. Overkill, but fine. But then their company’s FAQ tells us this:
only the final data, namely presence of a person, estimated age and estimated gender, is collected without any association with an individual.
So they ARE collecting data, and they are trying to obfuscate that fact by saying they are just “activating the purchasing interface”. This isn’t just turning on a lighted display when a person is standing there. “Activating the purchasing interface” means activating the algorithms to analyze my appearance. They are trying to figure out who is buying their product. That’s different.
So they are being shady about their true intentions. They aren’t being up front, and they expect us to trust that they aren’t storing or transmitting anything other than estimated age and sex. Hmm, maybe. But their actions don’t build trust.
Plus, now I have to worry about VENDING MACHINES getting hacked and being used as surveillance devices now too?? Can I just buy a candy bar without being reminded we live in a dystopia?
You can make this a macro and trigger it with just a hot key.
Select Start Recording in the Macro menu. Open the search dialog, in the “Find what” field just type three characters: “:.*” (that’s a colon, period, and asterisk). In the “Replace with” field enter just a single colon. Switch search mode to “Regular expression”, and make sure “matches new line” box is not checked, and hit Replace All.
Now Stop Recording in the Macro menu, and then Save Current Recorded Macro. Give it a name and optionally a hot key, and note you can run it from the Macro menu or the hot key.
I agree this is a legitimate goal. I guess I’m just thinking they need to be transparent about it. The representative should be clear what they are doing and not insinuate they are only identifying the presence of a human and that’s it. They probably should even have a sign on the machine to notify people they are being videoed. When I get into my Ford Escape the touch screen tells me I’m supposed to notify my passengers of privacy concerns because I have location services turned on. This sort of privacy notification seems standard these days.