The search for More Money

It might be advertisements. Some newer gas stations/grocery stores have ads playing on the refrigerated section and when it detects someone on front of the door it will go clear or show a picture of what's behind the door.

It's completely ridiculous but it's where things are going now.

At this point it costs more money to make a "dumb" vending machine. The cost of a SBC is nothing, and it has more than enough horsepower to process transactions. All that extra horsepower + a 10 cent camera could be used to generate more money with facial recognition so naturally they're gonna spend the extra 10 cents + cost to drill a hole to do it. It's practically free to do it.

MathNews reported that Invenda Group's FAQ list said that "only the final data, namely presence of a person, estimated age and estimated gender, is collected without any association with an individual."

Makes sense why the machine owner would seek this information either for their own use or to sell to others in related fields. Maybe they can use it combined with records of product sales (vs. a very literal form of window-shopping) to identify areas more likely than others to bring consistent returns on the investment of placing, stocking and servicing the machines based on the age/gender statistics of nearby population centers.

Doesn't mean I'd want to be part of their dataset or would be comfortable allowing their installation in a facility where that decision was up to me though.

Accounts tied to school ID card? That way you can’t steal someone’s and use theirs, just polls a database and correlates your picture to your id image or something.

About the only use case I can think of for a school.

I can tell you why, as no one here seems to have used these. These are rooms of food items with no workers. Say 10 fridges and other items like apples, bananas, coffee machines microwaves etc sitting out. You walk up, grab what you want, use what you want and then check yourself out. It would be wrong to sell any user data but they did this because they were losing money trying to staff lunch rooms. It costs less to ditch warm/cooler food, and rather balance food loss off these items who know they are being filmed and will likely be expelled from the college for stealing. An example woukd be Gulf Coast State College

Instead of thinking vending machine, think food court with self checkout. (Saw this both in a FL colllege and also had this at a private company in TN)

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

You gotta read through the carefully worded line toeing bullshit though; fingerprint readers on timeclocks no longer store fingerprint images but they can sure as fuck identify your finger. If operating similarly, it likely stores your face as a unique value, and can track unique purchases. Importantly, this can be sent to other machines to identify customers anywhere, and then of course, if that same technology is used in other machines, well shoot, any purchase you make at a vending machine is tracked to your face.

The statement says individual purchases cannot be tracked to the individual but could be wordsmithing this with implication of anonymity but in actuality you're tracked by a value. Also, if this were true why was this done so surreptitiously? They will claim I'm court an individual can't be identified but of course once the technology is commonplace it would be only too easy for corps to join a data broker orgy and find out who's who.

I don't know what is in the GDPR related to the above, but Cameras and storing pictures are old hat. Could be that carefully worded shit was because it's not technically a picture of you and also because they'll delete it upon request.