Students at the University of Waterloo discovered that their candy machines were covertly collecting facial recognition data when 'Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe' crashed. pic.twitter.com/XhpM8t5CpV
— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) February 24, 2024
1 Comment
I still find a lot of privacy concerns weird because they’re often things that are fine when a human does it.
I get “profiled” by human vendors all the time. They guess what language to speak to me in. They guess my gender. They guess my wealth. They remember what I ordered yesterday. I get loyalty discounts.
Do I care if they tell someone else generalized/anonymous info about their sales so they can learn to target customers better? Not really. “Men tend to prefer certain colors” “This guy always asks to hold the fries”.
Do I care if they collect data from potential customers that walk in front of them vision instead of only people who actually buy from them? Not really.
There are certainly differences between the two. But which is the key difference that makes people not like it? Is it the scale? The efficiency? Moving the data into a database? Selling the data? Doing it consciously instead of subconsciously? A corporation is doing it? Is it just the psychological effect of defamiliarization (when you describe something familiar in unfamiliar terms to force someone to reexamine the concept)?