I pulled the vendor's brochure; if you were curious what a vending machine would use this information for...
They collect demographics on WHO is purchasing what items including gender, age, etc. They use this information for targeting advertising (inc. with "partner media brokers").
They're also proud that when users install their app, it uses "gamification" to increase sales (whatever that means).
Vending machines covered by a large screen stand for everything I hate about contemporary tech.
They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective. Every step of the transaction is made worse. You can't glance at the entire inventory. You never know how much of an item is left. The machine does not reliably know how much of an item is left. Every interaction lags. And in return I get ads and mini games. Just so some C-suite cretin (guess what the C in C*O stands for) can show his little cretin friends how innovative his farts are.
It is late. I am hungry. My train departs in 2 minutes. Please, I just want a bloody Snickers.
> They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective.
It's the "good ads" argument -- this machine can guess your age/gender and offer up items most purchased by your demographic, all the while feeding that data back to the vendor. Who wouldn't love that? :-/
More seriously, this has been a standard capability in vending machines, fast food menu systems, and digital signage in general for over a decade. Check out this ad from 2012 for Intel's AIM Suite for an example of how this stuff is pitched: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdMIp2vQjG8
"Is the viewer a teenage girl? Then change to content to highlight a back-to-school shoe sale a few doors down. Is it a senior male? Then why not tell him about the golf club sale at the sporting goods store?"
Did you ever have the pleasure of encountering the US drugstore that replaced the entire set of doors of its entire refrigerated section with hulking, bright, animated, human-height-and-ultra-heavy TV screens?
The one upside I would offer is that with some of them, you can "click" the item to view nutritional facts and ingredients. That's invaluable to me personally, as frequently I want the "least sugary" option available in the machine.
That's quite the brochure. My favorite selling point is the way you can make the machine display products that it's doesn't actually have inside, sell them, and give the punter a digital IOU instead of the soda they tried to buy...
> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."
Somehow managing to turn a convenience-driven impulse buy into an additional chore to redeem later.
At the end of the day, there must be some angle I'm not understanding or these features wouldn't actually drive sales. I wonder if the idea is to vend digital products? Drive traffic to nearby physical stores through some kind of targeted digital coupon? Has anyone seen this kind of thing in the wild?
Wow... the whole point of a vending machine is to get a soda when you want to have a soda, if you wanted to have a soda later you could get it (usually a lot cheaper) at a supermarket? I hope there's at least a warning message where you can abort your purchase before you get the "voucher" instead of the actual product?
>> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."
Speaking only for myself, this would not be long-term profitable for the vending machine company, as the cost of them fixing the boot-sized hole in the machine would be far higher than the $2 they stole from me.
Place it somewhere where there are enough people that haven't tried it before and trick them into buying something they don't want. No one will ever use it more than once.
Detecting "gender" by facial recognition on a 21st century uni campus in the USA ... what could _possibly_ go wrong and cause a massive media meltdown?
The machines use the charitably named "demographic sensor" which is obviously the embedded camera linked to a "facial recognition" application, BUT, it doesn't appear that it actually recognizes (or records) faces. Meaning, it's not linking your face to any online identity, or recording your face at all. In fact, the company is European and claims that their entire platform is GDPR compliant, which is... probably true?
Rather, it throws out a series of guesses and confidence values of a person's age, gender, and race, and allow the planogram (and OOH advertising) to change dynamically based on that information.
Which is not necessarily great, but also an entire order of magnitude less invasive than every interaction any casual user has on the internet with any ad ever. Or, frankly, with any POS system recording a repeat purchase from your credit card, from which motivated vendors can back into the rest of the demographic data.
I'm not excusing it, but while the error reads "facial recognition", it's more "stereotyping enablement platform," which, while only marginally better, is probably still better.
It's also hilarious to think of the thing displaying the green M&M if you're a "probable" woman, and the red or yellow M&M if you're a "probable" man, and seeing how long it'd take for anyone to correlate the change.
That's what the company claims, and maybe it's right, but how do we know? Do we have access to the source code? Will it change in future? You can be absolutely sure that if the company thought they could make more money by storing the photographs or somehow associating them with real identities then they would.
In theory they can do something like "Why do you look so sad? Maybe a Mars can cheer you up!". This can be done while being GDPR complient but people don't like that. It creates a feeling that everything is watching you.
Privacy is not about hiding things, it is about controlling what you want to show.
> In fact, the company is European and claims that their entire platform is GDPR compliant, which is... probably true?
I don't see how it is. The mere processing of my personal information (age, gender, race – doesn't matter that it's only a guess/estimate) without my explicit consent or any contractual need should already represent a violation of GDPR.
> In fact, the company is European and claims that their entire platform is GDPR compliant, which is... probably true?
Is a picture of my face necessary to sell me a chocolate bar ? I would say not, and if they take it without asking consent before I would say that it is not GDPR compliant.
Honestly the whole thing would be funny if it's wasn't part of the dystopian society we're building. Is this... innovation now? What are we trying to optimize society for? Extracting maximum rents? But were will the money come from if everyone is doing the same thing and producing nothing of value?
I’m sure this is real but just for fun I’m entertaining the idea that someone is trolling — either with a fun dialog title or the app name.
I worked at a company in the late 2000s that moved to an office with automatic urinals. These were fairly novel at the time and had a matte black plastic unit with a flush handle that also had a shiny window made of dark, IR transparent plastic. It was clearly some kind of proximity sensor for the autoflush but some joker made an official “do not touch the cameras” sign that wound a few people up.
It’s probably something like Apple’s Face ID sensor, which is a “camera” in the strict sense of the word but it captures a depth map rather than an image. I’m willing to believe that they aren’t transmitting images or even raw depth maps over the Internet (for one thing, it would be a lot of data and it’s hard to conceive of what the use of such data would be), but they are almost certainly attempting to correlate demographic information, or possibly even individual users, with specific purchasing patterns.
They don't have to transmit images. It's enough to generate a unique hash that can track your activity in the presence of the panopticons. Sweeten the deal even more by capturing your IMSI for future reference.
In 2018 Renesas had a "Facial Expression Kit Giveaway" contest and I was one of the winners. It was the "RZ Omron Facial Expression Kit giveaway". RZ being one of their newer, at the time, Micro lines. I had to sign an affidavit to get my prize, which I did. Never did use it and it eventually went to a local Hamfest. Their example code was a vending machine.
Some places (colleges were very bad about this) would use your SSN as both an ID and a password - so to buy at the cafeteria you’d swipe your student ID and your PIN was the last four of your social.
Some workplaces did it too. It’s mostly gone now, but pieces still remain.
Isn't facial recognition wide spread in the US yet?
In the UK we're already using it everywhere. Most stores and checkout systems have it. It's used in CCTV across the country. It's used by police to identify protestors. Schools in my area even install spyware on kids phones to monitor them and their families.
I can't imagine anyone would mind having being identified by a vending machine here lol... What's the risk?
When I read the story that schools in my area had been installing spyware on students phones I assumed it was some kind of isolated thing. But my GF works in schools so I asked her if she knew of this app and she was like, "oh yeah, all the kids have it".
I found this utterly insane but she seemed to think it was a good thing if it could be used to protect kids. And I guess I get the argument, but you could say the same thing about the government installing CCTV in everyone's homes... You need to draw lines, especially when there's an expectation of privacy.
This is my concern with facial recognition in shops too. If I go into a shop I expect people to see my face, so a simple CCTV system seems fine. I even expect people who know me might recognise who I am, so again, if a human being I've interacted with before identifies me on the CCTV system I'm okay with this. What I don't think people expect is to be identified by some automated national biometric system which checks to see if you've ever stolen anything before so it can alert security, while also trying to understand your emotions and individual purchasing habits.
I used to work for a large highstreet retail org and was literally pitched on a system which could identify our customers and tell us how they feel about their shopping experience and their shopping habits.
But like I say, no one cares. I've spoken about this with people so often and they act like I'm some kind of privacy lunatic. That said, people here get very animated if someone can access data they've personally shared to Facebook and made publicly available.
The risk is the countless little bits of info being gathered by all this tech falling into the hands of the next genocidal despot. I wonder which metric they'll base their cleansing around?
This stuff drives me mental, but the article ends up not being quite the black pill it could be. Nice to see students fighting back at the grassroots, the University (hopefully) acting, and people feeling enpowered to do something under the law.
We have to keep pushing for this stuff to become less and less normalised, and also for penalties to become more and more serious. When that happens, people will continue to feel more enpowered to fight this stuff. We should also make sure laws are clear that people have the right to "vandalise" such devices. In my opinion taking a bat to one of these things should at least be defensible in court.
I wonder where the line in the sand exists for what people feel is “okay” tracking and “not okay” tracking. Here it seems to be that almost universally, the students dislike the facial recognition. Many folks I’ve spoken to otherwise don’t care about being tracked online. I suppose people are more sensitive to being tracked when it transitions into the real world and becomes more “real.”
There’s an implied consent. I know that creating a Gmail account means that Google has access to all my emails. By using Gmail, I’m relatively aware that they’re building an ad profile on me, and I implicitly consent to that.
But if I found out they’re collecting the bloodwork pdfs my doctor sends and selling them to insurance companies, that would be objectively beyond any reasonable consent.
If you’re selling me M&Ms, I have a very very low tolerance for what I consider appropriate data collection.
You know, though I am not sure of how well-known it is outside of tech circles.
I agree with the second point. Facial recognition for demographic stats seems kinda reasonable if it's anonymised properly, but people don't like their photo being taken without knowledge of it.
I don't mind being targeted online since it changes the ads I see from "Acai berry smoothies" to "beach vacations". Something I am not interested in, to something I am interested in (due to browsing history). That makes my experience better and I understand the trade off while using a free product (Google Maps, Facebook etc etc).
However, the difference in this case is that the vending company (or someone along the chain) is using it to serve demographic ads to the customer of the vending machine. I still have to pay for the product and it's not changing non targeted ads to targeted ads (there were no ads before). I'm sure they aren't passing along some of the ad revenue to me since there's no competition (I'm sure all vending machines in the area are owned by the same company). So this is just a source of extra revenue for the company and serves no purpose to the user.
All right. I try my best to keep my adverts as random as possible(if they appear at all), since somehow it feels like I'm being passively influenced by viewing the same sort of adverts suggesting I buy stuff repeatedly.
The way they're sticking ads on everything with or without tracking is pretty annoying. I hope they lose money with the tech they had to dev and install vs ad returns.
Readit News
They collect demographics on WHO is purchasing what items including gender, age, etc. They use this information for targeting advertising (inc. with "partner media brokers").
They're also proud that when users install their app, it uses "gamification" to increase sales (whatever that means).
See here, they're super proud of it too:
https://a.storyblok.com/f/184550/x/e7435c019e/brochure-svm_g...
They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective. Every step of the transaction is made worse. You can't glance at the entire inventory. You never know how much of an item is left. The machine does not reliably know how much of an item is left. Every interaction lags. And in return I get ads and mini games. Just so some C-suite cretin (guess what the C in C*O stands for) can show his little cretin friends how innovative his farts are.
It is late. I am hungry. My train departs in 2 minutes. Please, I just want a bloody Snickers.
These companies are a blight.
It's the "good ads" argument -- this machine can guess your age/gender and offer up items most purchased by your demographic, all the while feeding that data back to the vendor. Who wouldn't love that? :-/
More seriously, this has been a standard capability in vending machines, fast food menu systems, and digital signage in general for over a decade. Check out this ad from 2012 for Intel's AIM Suite for an example of how this stuff is pitched: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdMIp2vQjG8
"Is the viewer a teenage girl? Then change to content to highlight a back-to-school shoe sale a few doors down. Is it a senior male? Then why not tell him about the golf club sale at the sporting goods store?"
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-sc...
> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."
Somehow managing to turn a convenience-driven impulse buy into an additional chore to redeem later.
At the end of the day, there must be some angle I'm not understanding or these features wouldn't actually drive sales. I wonder if the idea is to vend digital products? Drive traffic to nearby physical stores through some kind of targeted digital coupon? Has anyone seen this kind of thing in the wild?
Speaking only for myself, this would not be long-term profitable for the vending machine company, as the cost of them fixing the boot-sized hole in the machine would be far higher than the $2 they stole from me.
Place it somewhere where there are enough people that haven't tried it before and trick them into buying something they don't want. No one will ever use it more than once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hwnGrn3go
Rather, it throws out a series of guesses and confidence values of a person's age, gender, and race, and allow the planogram (and OOH advertising) to change dynamically based on that information.
Which is not necessarily great, but also an entire order of magnitude less invasive than every interaction any casual user has on the internet with any ad ever. Or, frankly, with any POS system recording a repeat purchase from your credit card, from which motivated vendors can back into the rest of the demographic data.
I'm not excusing it, but while the error reads "facial recognition", it's more "stereotyping enablement platform," which, while only marginally better, is probably still better.
It's also hilarious to think of the thing displaying the green M&M if you're a "probable" woman, and the red or yellow M&M if you're a "probable" man, and seeing how long it'd take for anyone to correlate the change.
In theory they can do something like "Why do you look so sad? Maybe a Mars can cheer you up!". This can be done while being GDPR complient but people don't like that. It creates a feeling that everything is watching you.
Privacy is not about hiding things, it is about controlling what you want to show.
I don't see how it is. The mere processing of my personal information (age, gender, race – doesn't matter that it's only a guess/estimate) without my explicit consent or any contractual need should already represent a violation of GDPR.
Is a picture of my face necessary to sell me a chocolate bar ? I would say not, and if they take it without asking consent before I would say that it is not GDPR compliant.
I worked at a company in the late 2000s that moved to an office with automatic urinals. These were fairly novel at the time and had a matte black plastic unit with a flush handle that also had a shiny window made of dark, IR transparent plastic. It was clearly some kind of proximity sensor for the autoflush but some joker made an official “do not touch the cameras” sign that wound a few people up.
Is the "USB optical sensor" really a hidden camera, and "digital image maps" is images from the hidden camera?
If so, then are they also being weaselly in the rest of the sentence?
> without storing such data on permanent memory mediums or transmitting it over the Internet to the Cloud.”
This is the only related item I could find today:
"OMRON Develops Real-Time Facial Expression Estimation Technology"
https://www.omron.com/media/press/2012/10/e1023.html
Some workplaces did it too. It’s mostly gone now, but pieces still remain.
In the UK we're already using it everywhere. Most stores and checkout systems have it. It's used in CCTV across the country. It's used by police to identify protestors. Schools in my area even install spyware on kids phones to monitor them and their families.
I can't imagine anyone would mind having being identified by a vending machine here lol... What's the risk?
This is a info collector which potentially disseminates information across the world, to sell better ads.
Meanwhile, categories of you are being made. Do you buy a soda every friday at 05:00? "Party Animal".
Or not. Who knows. Maybe they just spend the extra dollars on the software and camera because they really do want to lose money on it.
Wow - I have even more respect for the people who risk their lives to damage and tear down government surveillance cameras for the common good.
When I read the story that schools in my area had been installing spyware on students phones I assumed it was some kind of isolated thing. But my GF works in schools so I asked her if she knew of this app and she was like, "oh yeah, all the kids have it".
I found this utterly insane but she seemed to think it was a good thing if it could be used to protect kids. And I guess I get the argument, but you could say the same thing about the government installing CCTV in everyone's homes... You need to draw lines, especially when there's an expectation of privacy.
This is my concern with facial recognition in shops too. If I go into a shop I expect people to see my face, so a simple CCTV system seems fine. I even expect people who know me might recognise who I am, so again, if a human being I've interacted with before identifies me on the CCTV system I'm okay with this. What I don't think people expect is to be identified by some automated national biometric system which checks to see if you've ever stolen anything before so it can alert security, while also trying to understand your emotions and individual purchasing habits.
I used to work for a large highstreet retail org and was literally pitched on a system which could identify our customers and tell us how they feel about their shopping experience and their shopping habits.
But like I say, no one cares. I've spoken about this with people so often and they act like I'm some kind of privacy lunatic. That said, people here get very animated if someone can access data they've personally shared to Facebook and made publicly available.
We have to keep pushing for this stuff to become less and less normalised, and also for penalties to become more and more serious. When that happens, people will continue to feel more enpowered to fight this stuff. We should also make sure laws are clear that people have the right to "vandalise" such devices. In my opinion taking a bat to one of these things should at least be defensible in court.
But if I found out they’re collecting the bloodwork pdfs my doctor sends and selling them to insurance companies, that would be objectively beyond any reasonable consent.
If you’re selling me M&Ms, I have a very very low tolerance for what I consider appropriate data collection.
I agree with the second point. Facial recognition for demographic stats seems kinda reasonable if it's anonymised properly, but people don't like their photo being taken without knowledge of it.
However, the difference in this case is that the vending company (or someone along the chain) is using it to serve demographic ads to the customer of the vending machine. I still have to pay for the product and it's not changing non targeted ads to targeted ads (there were no ads before). I'm sure they aren't passing along some of the ad revenue to me since there's no competition (I'm sure all vending machines in the area are owned by the same company). So this is just a source of extra revenue for the company and serves no purpose to the user.
The way they're sticking ads on everything with or without tracking is pretty annoying. I hope they lose money with the tech they had to dev and install vs ad returns.