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Students Horrified When Error Message Appears on Vending Machine, Revealing Something Dark (Facial Recognition) (futurism.com)

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

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Oh this is just too messed up..now vending machines have cameras in them?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (10 children)

So I may be reading too far into this, but does this machine check your age and ethnicity to work out how much you might be willing to pay for M&Ms then charge you that much?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

According to the article, it's done for market research, i.e. finding out who buys what, which is a thing businesses like to know. But also apparently it allows the machine to generate "AI-powered product recommendations", which i guess means it tailors reccomendations to each user? Which it can do because it has a touch screen, and the touch screen itself already strikes me as full of shit.

That's what the article says this machine in particular does; but yes, it could totally change the price on you depending on what you look like, and all other kinds of deeply shady things. You can count on a private company to do that kind of thing and then use their favorite argument: it's technically legal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It mentioned targeted discounts based on demographic, which sounds to be like pricing things based on demographic.

If the data is local and stays on the machine, I'm guessing they mean the face data. They are probably sending the data about what demographics buy what things at what price point to feed to other machines.

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