- The University of Waterloo is expected to remove smart vending machines from its campus.
- A student discovered an error code that suggested the machines used facial-recognition technology.
- Vending Services said the technology didn’t take or store customers’ photos.
So facial recognition in this case means that it can recognize that a face exists? No particular details but just a face? That’s a lot less egregious than I assumed from the headline. With all the AI stuff going on these days, I assumed it was some kind of data mining operation
It does also estimate age and gender, so there’s some potential for data mining. But not much.
But then, why? Is there a problem with birds and dogs making purchases at these machines that they need to identify a face?