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?
Okay, now that’s a plausible explanation. Some of those subs may have been private and coming back online over several days. Thanks for the insight.
If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.
They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.
I’ve been using Bitwarden for years now, and I really enjoy the seamless experience across platforms. I use Windows at work, Mac/Linux/Windows at home, I also have an iPhone, iPad, Android tablets, and a Chromebook. Bitwarden works great everywhere. I originally chose it because it’s open source so I could host it myself if I wanted to.
I actually pay for Premium ($10/year) because I wanted to use FIDO hardware keys, but you also get 1GB for encrypted file attachments, which is handy.
BitWarden does everything I want, so I have a hard time considering paying far more for 1Password which does the same thing.
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.