A set of smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo is expected to be removed from campus after students raised privacy concerns about their software.
The machines have M&M artwork on them and sell chocolate and other candy. They are located throughout campus, including in the Modern Languages building and Hagey Hall.
Earlier this month, a student noticed an error message on one of the machines in the Modern Languages building. It appeared to indicate there was a problem with a facial recognition application.
“We wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the application error. There’s no warning here,” said River Stanley, a fourth-year student, who investigated the machines for an article in the university publication, mathNEWS.
Why in the ever living hell would a vending machine need local-only facial recognition…
My guess is to associate which product is best selling to which demographic to better target them.
So ingenious 🤮
I feel like it’d be tough to find a chip powerful enough to capture demographic attributes while also cheap enough to ship in vending machines? But admittedly I’ve little context on embedded systems and their capabilities
While I have no idea how much a computerized vending machine costs, I found this article about a age/gender classifier that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Looking at the machine’s big touchscreen, I think this classifier would fit on the SBC or require a relatively small upgrade.
Yikes, smh… Yep that’ll do it. I hate this timeline.
Same Raspberry Pi foundation that hired a cop with a background in surveillance tech as their “resident maker”?
The error message says “.exe” and looks like a dot net namespace.
Would it be significantly more costly than some of the features vending machines already have, such as card readers? I think these things are pretty costly already, but the profit margin on snacks and soft drinks is extremely high, so I’d imagine they’d recoup their cost pretty quickly.
Well I thought so, but apparently we have good enough software that can run on a rasp pi now, so clearly the hardware requirements are much much lower than I understood.
Geez, I remember needing to use cloud services just for simple OCR not that long ago…
Doritos are probably plenty powerful enough
There’s a vending machine in a co-working space I use sometimes that has a full on fridge and oven, and when you order off the touchscreen…something happens inside and sometimes a hot cooked thing comes out. I have no idea how it works and have not used it myself, because it seems possibly kinda gross.
Why the living hell would anyone agree to develop this? What douchbags are doing that job?
There’s a lot of people in the world who do, in fact, like to eat.
There are also a lot of people, already in the wealthiest upper percentiles, who would implement big brother just to be slightly wealthier.
“I was only following orders”
Problem is, if you refuse to do it, they’ll hire another developer who will.
There are people who actually believe that kind of dystopic bullshit, even in the tech sector. I remember a colleague a few years ago, told me he liked targeted ads because “it knew what I wanted”
Oh boy, those people frustrate me so much. The ones who have a verbal conversation about a topic they’ve never talked about before, like owning a cat, or taking a cruise to Alaska, and then giggle gleefully when they are inundated with cat litter and cruise ship ads wherever they go on the internet.
Some people just don’t care. And that’s actually fine. The ones who do care will try to look after the morons.
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Probably exploited labor, similar to those who have no choice but to work in scam call centers to survive.
Pretty unfortunate that things are like this IMO
I don’t think software developers working in AI are “exploited labour just doing it to survive”
Bro theres plenty of people who run scams in big offices all day every day
“local only”
Even if it’s technically local-only, pretty easy for a tech to drive by and pull data it’s stored.
Or when it gets filled.
Its not really local only either, the cameras exist for the point of data harvesting, just look at their marketing. They only mean they’re not streaming video to a server for recognition. The after-recognition data is still sent to a server https://www.invendagroup.com/vending-machines
You know, when technology really got started, I had dreams about tech knowing me, doing things for me, acting in my best interest. Smile at the cashier, and my bill is paid, entering any public building, and I’m added to the queue, my documents already there… A vending machine would know me, holding back that last Snickers bar, because it knew that I would come by today…
It could have been good. It could have been right. On another planet, with another species. :')