Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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'Facial recognition' error message on vending machine sparks concern at University of Waterloo (kitchener.ctvnews.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

148 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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...