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.

    • MajorSauce@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      My guess is to associate which product is best selling to which demographic to better target them.

      So ingenious 🤮

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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        10 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

        • MajorSauce@sh.itjust.works
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          10 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.

        • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          10 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
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            10 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…

        • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works
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          10 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.

      • Neato@ttrpg.network
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        10 months ago

        There’s a lot of people in the world who do, in fact, like to eat.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        10 months ago

        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”

        • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          I don’t think software developers working in AI are “exploited labour just doing it to survive”

      • Exocrinous@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        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.

          • Exocrinous@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            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.

              • Exocrinous@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                No.

                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.

                  • Exocrinous@lemm.ee
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                    10 months ago

                    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.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • otp@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              Every person should have a tracking implant and anyone should be able to access it.

              In that case, I would guess that you’re a man, and one who has never had a stalker.

                  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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                    10 months ago

                    Their argument would be that the stalker having privacy allows them to do the stalking…

                    they are indeed unhinged. If everything was magically public like they wish. We’d have no resources as every government official would be outed for what they were hiding. Would be complete anarchy real fast.

            • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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              10 months ago

              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.

              • Aux@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Well, you said it yourself - you only need privacy to commit a crime or to cheat on someone. Privacy should NOT exist!

                  • Aux@lemmy.world
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                    10 months ago

                    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

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      “local only”

      Even if it’s technically local-only, pretty easy for a tech to drive by and pull data it’s stored.

      Or when it gets filled.

    • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      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. :')

    • dan1101@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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.