Facial-recognition data is typically used to prompt more vending machine sales.

From the “no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse” department.

  • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

    This sounds like an excuse to me. I’m a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we’re ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

    It’s really, really clever how they’ve invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don’t even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you’d expect to find in a university.

    • Radiant_sir_radiant@beehaw.org
      1·
      10 months ago

      I suspect that’s a lie. From a technical point of view there are way easier and cheaper ways to detect potential customers. A simple LDR would probably do a better and more reliable job and cost hundreds of times less.

      The spokesdroid also stated that the machines do not take pictures. Duh. It’s a camera, what else would it do. May they meant it doesn’t store images, but the statements made so far don’t exactly instill trust.

      I say sue them into oblivion. Make an example out of them.