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.
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.
Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there’s really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine “I’d like to buy something”. What it sounds like to me is they’re using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.
Devil’s advocate: they don’t need to track demographics, but a “bonus feature” would be to start playing some ad when they detect someone looking at the machine. Not a random leaf or shadow, so it doesn’t start playing annoying ads at random in the background, but an actual face. Or do play a random ad in the background when nobody has looked at the machine in a while.
Of course the temptation of using demographic data to target the ads, could be too big to resist for the company. The temptation of also storing statistical data, might follow.
Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine’s contents, so I’m not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they’re claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can’t the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it’s a person trying to buy something?)
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.
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.
Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there’s really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine “I’d like to buy something”. What it sounds like to me is they’re using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.
Devil’s advocate: they don’t need to track demographics, but a “bonus feature” would be to start playing some ad when they detect someone looking at the machine. Not a random leaf or shadow, so it doesn’t start playing annoying ads at random in the background, but an actual face. Or do play a random ad in the background when nobody has looked at the machine in a while.
Of course the temptation of using demographic data to target the ads, could be too big to resist for the company. The temptation of also storing statistical data, might follow.
Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine’s contents, so I’m not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they’re claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can’t the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it’s a person trying to buy something?)