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.
It gets worse :/
I looked up the brand (Invenda). Their PDF includes “using AI”, “measuring foot traffic”, and gathering “gender/age/etc” e.g. facial recognition to estimate a persons age and gender
And in terms of “stored locally” this is straight from their website
The marketing also so fricken backwards that it reads like satire:
I’m dreading for the day they introduce dynamic pricing based on who’s buying and refuses to sell without a full face scan.
What really bothers me is the “measuring foot traffic”. I already refuse to use vending-machines because of the pricing and unhealthyness, but you’re telling me I need to make GDPR takedown requests just for walking to class?
Also this is data that any reasonable company could get in like half an hour of searching and asking.
There is data on how many meals are sold a day at the mensa, how many students are enrolled, how many students live on campus…
Unless the vending machine is in the last corner of the third floor of an half empty building, all this information can be puzzled together to get a good estimate of how many people are passing the machine on a day to day basis.
Fast food franchises always charge more in poor areas, I wonder if dynamic pricing would charge poor people more as well.
Got a source on this? I’d love to read more about that
@oxideseven Not offhand as it’s more something I know from experience but here are some news reports on it from my part of the world:
Poorer pay more
McDonald’s make meals different prices in different areas
And here’s a study from the US that found they charge Black neighbourhoods more.
Edit: looks like chain stores do it with fresh fruit and vegetables too.
Thanks! This is some wild stuff.
Why does privacy matter?
Price discrimination!
Login to LinkedIn to purchase [groceries / diapers / your new mechanical keyboard] 🤢
Shut the fuck up, they can hear you!
Try that with me, and I’ll unplug the fucker and cut the plug off.
People panic about face scan while the ongoing massive privacy breaches exist around online services and electronic devices. The amount of personal data that people pour into smartphones is enormous compared to using that vending machine. We need more GDPR.
They have to make it sound like it’s private and secure, but it really isn’t. It’s sad how dystopian our future is becoming.
I keep telling my zoomer son he needs to read 1984. Not to live his life in fear of it, but to help his awareness of it, and provide an example of what that sort of societal control can look like. It’s probably the one thing I nag him about. 5 years later he still hasn’t read it. lol
I haven’t read it in decades, but I still feel it’s hard to miss certain parallels with modern reality when you have.
A good book to pair with 1984 is A Brave New World. They both tackle forms of control but from two different approaches. In A Brave New World there’s no need for thought police. Every person is designed and crafted from conception to adulthood to never have a criminal thought.
That’s another good one! Thanks for reminding me of it! Kind of ironically I read most of that book while hiding from my job (that’s a story) in the bathroom for short periods of time in my early twenties.
Read Big brother by Cory Doctorow while you’re at it. It is excellent!
That plus Helen Nissenbaum. When you read 1984 and then start thinking about the concept of future contexts changing use of private data, you get real nervous.
When did it become ok for people to be violated so profusely without any consequence?
When society started paying for convenience?
At the dawn of civilization? Lol
Prostitutes, the world’s oldest profession, could be argued to be paying for convenience.
People also probably paid for cooked meals pretty early in civilization.
No phones back then, changed the game :)
And you can bet your ass that prostitutes sold information about their clients, if offered any compnsation for it. :)
There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it’s definitely being actively suppressed in many others.
Laws and lawyers. You can’t go there and beat them up. That pretty much paved the way. Money is just a toy to them. So there is zero risk involved.
“Welcome back, consumer unit number 74665!”
That’s specifically what they don’t do. They collect statistics, not individuals.
For now
The moment you collect data, it can be abused. To stop abuse, we must stop data being collected.
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I never would’ve questioned that using a vending machine with cash would be anything but private until reading that line.
(Well, the article was first…but if it wasn’t for the article, that line is sketchy as all hell)
GDPR desperately needed on the other side of the pond…
Article says they claim to be GDPR compliant.
Say Invenda (your brand here) five times to get a discount!
Vending machines used to get vandalized at my school. How much tech are they putting in these things now?
beuh, they obviously mean that the biometric data is stored and processed locally, not the data that results from that processing.
i mean that’s still kinda creepy but you’re making it seem like they didn’t obviously admit to it in the original sentence.