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.

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.

  • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    9 months ago

    I feel like it’d be tough to find a chip powerful enough to capture demographic attributes while also cheap enough to ship in vending machines? But admittedly I’ve little context on embedded systems and their capabilities

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      9 months ago

      There’s a vending machine in a co-working space I use sometimes that has a full on fridge and oven, and when you order off the touchscreen…something happens inside and sometimes a hot cooked thing comes out. I have no idea how it works and have not used it myself, because it seems possibly kinda gross.

    • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 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…

    • MajorSauce@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      While I have no idea how much a computerized vending machine costs, I found this article about a age/gender classifier that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4.

      Looking at the machine’s big touchscreen, I think this classifier would fit on the SBC or require a relatively small upgrade.