New York City is moving away from people paying for subway/bus rides with a pre-paid card or cash and going to a system where you pay with your credit card or smart wallet. Nice way to quietly monitor everyone's location and habits.
Sadly. Many people do not see things like you --correctly-- do. In my city, they are pushing people onto cards, which track everything, including transfers, and how? The fare on the card is like 5 cents cheaper. Many people have no foresight.
Technology does way more than what some consumers want without adding enough value. Ring doorbell just grossly increased their ring protect plan cost and I'm starting to wonder:
"Why are we paying monthly subscriptions for them to just store two months of snapshots with a few videos?"
Absolutely. Nowadays you could afford an external hard drive to store such a small amount of videos. Plus, it gives you the benefit of having fewer eyes on your data. The notion of storing data on the cloud turns me off of having certain indoor cameras.
Definitely, but I'd like to see more accessible solutions for less technical people, and that's possible with inter operative standards. It would be great if regulatory bodies required that all hardware supported at least one open standard.
who's hype for the state-industrial complex to track our every movement! surely this combined with a right wing political movement that is increasingly focused on punishing so-called enemies will never lead to a complete humanitarian disaster.
Yea, we need to fight to make sure that the state-industrial complex tracking our every movement is focused on punishing OUR so-called enemies, as defined by a small handful of Internet based social clubs (controlled and operated by people we know next to nothing about).
Throw in S-210, which could likely support face tracking tech for age verification, also handled by a third party. I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a playbook...
A massive and punitive fine for anyone gathering biometric data without express permssion would be a great way to discourage other companies from bringing that shit around. A billion or two ought to do it.
Your face is not private, nor are your fingerprints. In public and in many private properties that are open to the public(e.g. stores) you have no expectation of privacy so you can be filmed within the law. You consent to facial recognition by passive agreement when you enter the public without your face covered.
Facial recognition technology is everywhere and there is nothing that will be done to curb it's use.
Edit: To be clear, I do not support anyone or any entity using biometric data for any purpose except verification of identity for security purposes with intentional consent. Businesses or government using biometric data, or any data obtained without clear and willful consent, is unacceptable.
It's not apathy, it's an observation of the legal status of the situation.
Legally, you have no reasonable expectations of privacy in a public space, and as such anyone is free to record you. I don't think fingerprint data being collected from devices available to the public has been tried in court yet, but audio and video recordings certainly have been.
It's actually a good thing. Imagine if it was illegal for you to video cops.
You are so right. I'm dumbfounded by how apathetic Americans are when it comes to politics. The idea of making the change you want to see, seems like a foreign concept. This will bring in a lot of downvotes, but I'd be happy to find some kind of online community that excludes Americans. And, I don't mean by nationality, or even geography. Just this... acceptance of political depravity. In the US, you get the choice between "bat shit insane". And, if don't like that, you can vote Republican instead, which is orders of magnitude worse, with layers of vile shit. I'm tired. Most problems are so simple to solve. But the arguments are always presented between two things that don't matter.
Good luck. I'm gonna see if there is a lemmy community that actively blocks "American mentality". Which is hilarious, because a lot of Americans express that lemmy is "extremely communist / anti capitalist" etc. Which is just what "common sense" looks like to Americans.
Most states do not have any laws which restrict how biometrics are used. So using your fingerprint, face, or iris to checkout at the store doesn't have any protections that would prevent that biometric data from being sent somewhere else, including the police. A store could gather facial or even iris data from a camera and you would have no idea because they don't have to tell you.
Worse is that most people don't see the problem with the digital panopticon because "they haven't done anything wrong" and they are willing to give up their data for the idea of a theoretical safety.
So instead of changing the laws you would rather...just let it happen? Alternatively, you don't have to obey the law. Enamel paint is very cheap and easy to apply to lenses. I think breaking the machines would curb their use, no?
That's where the laws come in. I don't agree that recording and biometric information on people should be legally protected, unless you ask for permission first.
There is a massive fundamental difference between having a person see your face in public, or even having a basic security camera record your face, and having a system recognize your biometric data and stalk you through every public environment with extreme precision.
The general public should absolutely not accept the imposition of being expected to be followed through every public place by private corporate entities for undisclosed purposes. We can and should aggressively push government representatives to take strong regulatory action to outlaw this behavior and aggressively punish violations.
Will making these efforts actually change matters? Maybe, maybe not. Will throwing your hands up and just assuming it's impossible to change anything and that we should all just lay down and accept it as fact lead to the worst possible outcome? Absolutely.
Or do it like they do in China: if your company breaks the law you have two choices: donate it to the government or we take your CEO behind the shed for questioning.
That or a more elaborate sticker/photo taped far enough away so the camera may focus on it. Maybe an image of Alfred E. Neuman? Or some kind of FU meme?
Regardless of the privacy issues, if this is actually a default feature of this machine, why does the camera hole look like it was put there with a hammer?
I bet it's from people picking at it and the paint chipping off the sharp edge, but it does also look like the hole was drilled on a Friday afternoon by a guy who probably should have retired 10 years ago.
Yeah, that was a great story, but an odd missed opportunity for a cyberpunk game on hidden mass surveillance. I'm thinking of NG Resonance from Deus Ex: Invisible War. I.e., it's odd that Bredan's a.i. was used to just sell more drinks, rather than as a mass surveillance tool. People were forming relationships with him, providing him with all sorts of personal information.
The definition of pretty much every word these days has been hijacked to mean the exact opposite - like Google lets you "search" for things you "want", and Reddit would "connect" you to "humans people", FaceBook will steal all of your data share "news", again from "people", and so on.
I pretty much think of "smart" as now meaning "tactically weaponized to maximize corpo profits" - you know, "for your convenience"!:-P 🤮
I should probably read that - I figured that I get the gist having read Animal Farm but hey, if we are going to live out the irl version then it might be good to at least say that I read about it first!:-P
It is fascinating how some people see far (ahead), by virtue of seeing clear (to the soul/center of the human condition) - technology may change but we don't seem to. Asimov, Jules Verne, George Orwell, they are like techno- or cultural prophets, not that we listened, sadly:-(.
C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia) in addition to being a christian apologist also wrote philosophy about how Hitler was able to influence Europe during WWII, and I found that just fascinating e.g. if you avoid ever saying a thing but instead just act as if it is true then it is a way to avoid it being questioned. Evil people have access to so many tricks that a free & just society would never condone using (another big one lately is misinformation), nor would it even so much work in the other direction b/c getting people to question things is a major bonus in such a society so it's at best an anti-pattern there, and yet I wish we were much more aware of them b/c otherwise it is like facing a pathogen with no immune system.
Anyway thank you for reminding me of those quotes:-).
I looked up the brand (Invenda). Their PDF includes "using AI", "measuring foot traffic", and gathering "gender/age/etc" e.g. facial recognition to estimate a persons age and gender
And in terms of "stored locally" this is straight from their website
The machine comes with a “brain” – Invenda OS – and is connected to the Invenda Cloud, which allows you to manage it remotely and gather valuable environmental, consumer and transactional data. The device can be branded according to your requirements to further enhance your brand presence.
The marketing also so fricken backwards that it reads like satire:
For a consumer, there’s no greater comfort than shopping pressure-free. Invenda Wallet allows consumers to browse, select and pay for products leisurely and privately 🤦♂️
What really bothers me is the "measuring foot traffic". I already refuse to use vending-machines because of the pricing and unhealthyness, but you're telling me I need to make GDPR takedown requests just for walking to class?
Also this is data that any reasonable company could get in like half an hour of searching and asking.
There is data on how many meals are sold a day at the mensa, how many students are enrolled, how many students live on campus...
Unless the vending machine is in the last corner of the third floor of an half empty building, all this information can be puzzled together to get a good estimate of how many people are passing the machine on a day to day basis.
People panic about face scan while the ongoing massive privacy breaches exist around online services and electronic devices. The amount of personal data that people pour into smartphones is enormous compared to using that vending machine. We need more GDPR.
There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it's definitely being actively suppressed in many others.
I keep telling my zoomer son he needs to read 1984. Not to live his life in fear of it, but to help his awareness of it, and provide an example of what that sort of societal control can look like. It's probably the one thing I nag him about. 5 years later he still hasn't read it. lol
I haven't read it in decades, but I still feel it's hard to miss certain parallels with modern reality when you have.
A good book to pair with 1984 is A Brave New World. They both tackle forms of control but from two different approaches. In A Brave New World there's no need for thought police. Every person is designed and crafted from conception to adulthood to never have a criminal thought.
That's another good one! Thanks for reminding me of it! Kind of ironically I read most of that book while hiding from my job (that's a story) in the bathroom for short periods of time in my early twenties.
That plus Helen Nissenbaum. When you read 1984 and then start thinking about the concept of future contexts changing use of private data, you get real nervous.
beuh, they obviously mean that the biometric data is stored and processed locally, not the data that results from that processing.
i mean that's still kinda creepy but you're making it seem like they didn't obviously admit to it in the original sentence.
This story seems fishy. Why would the hole for the facial recognition camera be so poorly made? It looks like someone made it with a screwdriver, not something that was made in a factory.
In a choice between thinking that a vending machine company put facial recognition technology into a vending machine or prankster students hacked the device to display a suspicious error message I would suspect the latter is the case.
However, watching the video and looking at the brochures on the manufacturer’s website, it looks like the manufacturer did indeed put rudimentary facial recognition in so they could gather demographic information on their customers like gender and approximate age for marketing purposes. Maybe the hole was damaged by curious students?
(After seeing your edit) to be fair, there are a ton of overblown hype articles that are actually built on nothing. The opposite side of skepticism (jumping onto the outrage bandwagon) is worse and more common than being skeptical. Its a shame things are not easier to verify.
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
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.
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...
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.
Its not really local only either, the cameras exist for the point of data harvesting, just look at their marketing. They only mean they're not streaming video to a server for recognition. The after - recognition data is still sent to a server https://www.invendagroup.com/vending-machines
I'd do that. Privacy should not exist. Everything must be public and available to everyone. Every person should have a tracking implant and anyone should be able to access it.
Not /s. Privacy is a foreign concept for humans, invented a bit over a century ago. Privacy is a root cause of many social problems in our day and age.
Privacy as a human right is, indeed, new. The concept and the desire for it is old. Doing things and not wanting to get caught is as old as walking forward. What, you think the idea of cheating a romantic partner is new? That every military in history and prehistory exchanged letters with one another, saying what they were doing? That every important and "important" person always exposed everything they did and thought to everyone?
Also, keep in mind there's a significant number of serious journalists that need privacy in order to do their job of exposing crimes. I can already see you replying "They wouldn't need to do that if everything was public". True, but that would also mean that tyrants and wannabe tyrants would have incredible ease in killing everyone they disliked.
Huh, I didn't know that cheating on a romantic partner or starting a war was just preparing a surprise (parties, gifts, trips). Today I Learned, not /s
There are people who actually believe that kind of dystopic bullshit, even in the tech sector. I remember a colleague a few years ago, told me he liked targeted ads because "it knew what I wanted"
Oh boy, those people frustrate me so much. The ones who have a verbal conversation about a topic they’ve never talked about before, like owning a cat, or taking a cruise to Alaska, and then giggle gleefully when they are inundated with cat litter and cruise ship ads wherever they go on the internet.
Some people just don’t care. And that’s actually fine. The ones who do care will try to look after the morons.
What kind of amoral, selfish monster, would know full well that car emissions are exterminating life as we know it on earth, and still decide to drive a car?
The same kind of monster who develops this technology.
I’m all down for using public transportation and electric cars when you pay to fix the infrastructure, have it run 24/7, or buy me an overpriced electric car that doesn’t destroy the earth as well with lithium mining and all the non-renewable resources used to manufacture it. Certainly better than gas.
Although I’d argue the car manufacturer is the one you should be angry with, not the buyer who is limited by availability, a limited public transit system, and price.
Ah, so there we go. You have a perfect set of excuses for your own actions and why they're someone else's fault, but you struggle to understand how someone could develop software like this. The answer is: the same way as you. Excuses.
Aren't you taking this all a bit personally? I'm just using your own experiences to explain a situation you find difficult to understand. The douchebags are the same as you. Hope that helps.
Yeah, you're taking this way too personally. I'm out here explaining how people can justify doing bad things to themselves, and you're having a whole identity crisis over whether you're a bad person about it. Look, your personal difficulties excusing your own actions are none of my business.
If you're not taking this personally, why all the personal questions about my transit habits and finances? It seems like you're trying to use me as some kind of gotcha for why you don't have to introspect. Leave me out of it.
Best case scenario the machine has some sort of standard software with facial recognition code, but no hardware in the machine. Would he interesting to know.
You know, when technology really got started, I had dreams about tech knowing me, doing things for me, acting in my best interest. Smile at the cashier, and my bill is paid, entering any public building, and I'm added to the queue, my documents already there... A vending machine would know me, holding back that last Snickers bar, because it knew that I would come by today...
It could have been good. It could have been right. On another planet, with another species. :')
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