64 replies
3d13h
I pulled the vendor's brochure; if you were curious what a vending machine would use this information for...
They collect demographics on WHO is purchasing what items including gender, age, etc. They use this information for targeting advertising (inc. with "partner media brokers").
They're also proud that when users install their app, it uses "gamification" to increase sales (whatever that means).
See here, they're super proud of it too:
https://a.storyblok.com/f/184550/x/e7435c019e/brochure-svm_g...
The machines use the charitably named "demographic sensor" which is obviously the embedded camera linked to a "facial recognition" application, BUT, it doesn't appear that it actually recognizes (or records) faces. Meaning, it's not linking your face to any online identity, or recording your face at all. In fact, the company is European and claims that their entire platform is GDPR compliant, which is... probably true?
Rather, it throws out a series of guesses and confidence values of a person's age, gender, and race, and allow the planogram (and OOH advertising) to change dynamically based on that information.
Which is not necessarily great, but also an entire order of magnitude less invasive than every interaction any casual user has on the internet with any ad ever. Or, frankly, with any POS system recording a repeat purchase from your credit card, from which motivated vendors can back into the rest of the demographic data.
I'm not excusing it, but while the error reads "facial recognition", it's more "stereotyping enablement platform," which, while only marginally better, is probably still better.
It's also hilarious to think of the thing displaying the green M&M if you're a "probable" woman, and the red or yellow M&M if you're a "probable" man, and seeing how long it'd take for anyone to correlate the change.
I can't wait for the shitstorm when it starts suggesting grape soda to POC.
What's a POC? And why would pushing grape soda at them cause a shitstorm?
Person of color. Because of the implication.
Honestly, as a European some American racist tropes are truly baffling to me. Stereotypically Black people apparently enjoy watermelons, deep fried chicken and grape soda. In other words Black people allegedly like food humans often like and Americans managed to take than and make it racist.
I'm not saying it's not used as a racist trope. I'm saying it's amazing how Americans managed to be racist enough to make such a non-issue racist.
My experience has been that european cultures are approximately as racist as the US, they just have different histories and dynamics so it comes out differently. There is a lot less visible reckoning with race as well, which makes it easier to assume or pretend that there are no problems with it.
Just don't ask Europeans about gypsies. The racism is next level in Europe.
And you're a European? As a fellow European (balkans) I can comfortably say that many European cultures are racist as hell, to a degree that would make even quite a few Americans blush. I'd be careful about feeling any superiority over supposed European sophistication even in Western Europe.
Ask nearly anyone there about gypsies, jews or arabs in a context where they think they can speak honestly and privately. The kind of shit that gave Europe at least one huge holocaust and god knows how many pogroms before that hasn't entirely gone away, it's mostly just better camouflaged and with some of its sharper edges cut away.
The racism is in the context of deprivation. Watermelon in and of itself is neutral. In America however, freed slaves did not have access to good agricultural land that could grow many fruits and vegetables. Watermelon grows on poor quality soil, so it was available to the poorest black sharecropper.
Because of this, it became associated with black people, and thereby with criminality, low education and poverty among the dominant culture that created this sort of pattern-matching.
Stereotypically Black people apparently enjoy watermelons, deep fried chicken and grape soda.
Check, check, check. Yum! TIL that I could pass for black in America. OK, maybe not.
Unfortunately grape soda is almost impossible to find in Madrid, I've only tried it a couple of times, first in Rota Base, and loved it.
Engagement metrics effects on a corporate society
Meet-and-greet the first few days at my college dorm nearly 20 years ago:
I think it was around then I first learned of the watermelon / friend chicken stereotype (I didn't get why everyone laughed when he said this), but "grape soda" is a new one to me.
Good. That at least will turn public opinion against this concept.
The whole notion of not even being allowed to see the same ads as your fellow man in a public space because you are involuntarily shunted into some kind of cohort is disgusting, regardless of what is being used to decide that.
Imagine walking somewhere and seeing all the digital ad screens around you switch to basket ball events or Kentucky Fried Chicken where they were showing tailor made suits just a second before. (Or ads for a pre-emptive rectal exam or mobility aids.)
It is invasive.
In theory they can do something like "Why do you look so sad? Maybe a Mars can cheer you up!". This can be done while being GDPR complient but people don't like that. It creates a feeling that everything is watching you.
Privacy is not about hiding things, it is about controlling what you want to show.
maybe I'm weird. I put small pieces of blue tape over all of the cameras in my dorm's vending machines for this reason, too.
Kind of surprised people haven't started putting a piece of tape over it, then coming back 8 hours later with a small drill and drilling through the now-blacked-out camera lens to permanently disable it in their living areas.
"You don't look like yourself today... have a Snickers!"
"Feeling good? Celebrate with a Mars bar!"
I don't see how it is. The mere processing of my personal information (age, gender, race – doesn't matter that it's only a guess/estimate) without my explicit consent or any contractual need should already represent a violation of GDPR.
As far as I understand it's not, because GDPR concerns itself with personally identifiable data and "age/gender/race" is not identifiable in general (in context of a vending machine in a large city).
Correlate this with the date and location of the vending machine and it's not so clear anymore. GDPR is also concerned with data that could potentially be used to identify you.
That's what the company claims, and maybe it's right, but how do we know? Do we have access to the source code? Will it change in future? You can be absolutely sure that if the company thought they could make more money by storing the photographs or somehow associating them with real identities then they would.
It's not a camera, it's an optical sensor, lol.
Is a picture of my face necessary to sell me a chocolate bar ? I would say not, and if they take it without asking consent before I would say that it is not GDPR compliant.
Honestly the whole thing would be funny if it's wasn't part of the dystopian society we're building. Is this... innovation now? What are we trying to optimize society for? Extracting maximum rents? But were will the money come from if everyone is doing the same thing and producing nothing of value?
Vending machines covered by a large screen stand for everything I hate about contemporary tech.
They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective. Every step of the transaction is made worse. You can't glance at the entire inventory. You never know how much of an item is left. The machine does not reliably know how much of an item is left. Every interaction lags. And in return I get ads and mini games. Just so some C-suite cretin (guess what the C in C*O stands for) can show his little cretin friends how innovative his farts are.
It is late. I am hungry. My train departs in 2 minutes. Please, I just want a bloody Snickers.
These companies are a blight.
Did you ever have the pleasure of encountering the US drugstore that replaced the entire set of doors of its entire refrigerated section with hulking, bright, animated, human-height-and-ultra-heavy TV screens?
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-sc...
Not to mention the genius of putting a heat generator right in front of the fridge.
I wonder if people opening it to look for something that is out of stock has a large effect.
No measurable effects were observed on the items not in stock.
I would argue that is worse than open refrigerators as you now have to also cool the heat producing TVs.
We spent all this money to replace inefficient open refrigerators with glass door ones just to undo it for advertising...
To Avakian, it’s simply an expected growing pain. Cooler Screens plans to educate customers about the digital displays and launch features like voice recognition, so shoppers can ask about prices or item locations.
“This is the future of retail and shopping,” Avakian said.
If this is our future of "education", these parasitic, data grubbing companies can fuck right off along with any larger company that supports them.
Nothing whatsoever about this in the least bit improves the time you spend grabbing something from a cooler. It's blatant enshitification of a very basic buying task that need not involve any further interface, and it so obviously does nothing but try to squeeze more money from said basic interaction for nobody's benefit except Walgreens, the companies paying for their grubby little digital visuals, and the scum-loaded company that's selling this garbage to them.
I can almost imagine a future in which even the tissue of toilet paper comes covered in "engagement" ad visuals impregnated into its material through some sort of micro-display technology. At last in that case it would get exactly the engagement it most deserves and afterwards go where it really belongs.
Yes, though at the time I believe it was static (no ads) so I was just left wondering why they felt the need to put up a TV screen showing what I'd see through the glass. It may have obscured whether something was in stock, but I forget.
The CEO at the end of the video talking about "educating" the consumers about the benefits of this new system really drives the point home that a large part of current tech is made and paid for by douchebags.
It turns out that whole thing was a grift where the former CEO left and founded the startup and then “sold” the Cooler Screens to his friends back at Walgreens. The new CEO came in and realized how dumb and expensive the screens were, killed the deal and is now being sued by the grifter.
The amount of effort that goes in to syncing up the contents of the fridge with what it is on the screen must be staggering. And not for a moment do I believe it reliably detects empty stock or the placement of the contents. Not to mention dealing with the extra heat it gives off.
Countless hours wasted and it is still worse than a glass panel in every way.
Not unlike orchestrating a dozen microservices and three Dooms worth of code to render a simple form to the three users a typical application has.
A little bit of an aside, but the absolute gol CNN website is impressive:
It's the "good ads" argument -- this machine can guess your age/gender and offer up items most purchased by your demographic, all the while feeding that data back to the vendor. Who wouldn't love that? :-/
More seriously, this has been a standard capability in vending machines, fast food menu systems, and digital signage in general for over a decade. Check out this ad from 2012 for Intel's AIM Suite for an example of how this stuff is pitched: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdMIp2vQjG8
"Is the viewer a teenage girl? Then change to content to highlight a back-to-school shoe sale a few doors down. Is it a senior male? Then why not tell him about the golf club sale at the sporting goods store?"
The technique in restaurants is to track the number of items sold, add innovative special dishes every day or week, and at the end of every week or month, remove the worst selling items on the menu and replace it with one of the special dishes. This over time creates demand. Vending machines can do the same. Remove the worst selling item and replace it with anything. After a time, the vending machine will only sell items with demand for that location.
And this requires absolutely zero screens, cameras, or demographic data collection of any kind. Just track the inventory. This isn't new; I would be extremely surprised if Japanese vending machines didn't do just that for decades already.
But those cameras aren't there because of the vending machine. That is just a convenient platform. This is about ads, and tracking, and data brokering. We had digital ad screens placed on the platforms at train stations in the Netherlands with a camera hole a few years ago, and the advertising company swore that those cameras would not be activated, for now, until the legal side was resolved, or until they could get away with it without anyone noticing.
It feels icky.
While I agree with you, the benefit is that it's automatic. That's the difference. It doesn't require anyone to count and track anything. It doesn't require thought or planning. It just happens. It doesn't require money spent on people to keep track of.
Whereas classic vending machine inventory systems requires an human person to track the re-fills or sales.
A happy medium would be no stupid cameras, but with electronic tracking and reporting of what is sold. That has to be a thing that can be done, right?
Your happy medium is what happens today in normal vending machines without cameras or giant screens. The normal boring glass-front ones that barely take credit cards.
The guy with a clipboard counting how many Diet Coke cans are missing hasn't been the way these things are managed since probably 2003.
Sorry?
You order by the # of the item.
This is recorded in NVRAM/sent to cloud nowadays.
There is absolutely no need to involve any human being in the process of tracking sales.
I wouldn't trust this automatic data for shit. When's the last time you used a vending machine that did not have any problems? The classic meme of people beating on a machine because something got stuck. How is that inventory managed? Does the inventory decrement every time someone pushes buttons to vend an item? Is it tracked by weight? Who enters the weight?
This seems like a system ripe for abuse by the manufacture on needing maintenance like the McDonald's soft server machine.
My experience is the opposite - vending machines tend to run out of the really popular stuff and they just don't replace it until most of the crap stuff is gone.
The "good ads" people need a "hammer to the face."
I'm okay with that flavor of "good ads".
I'm fine with a machine taking my observable physical characteristics and using that to select ads for me. I'm also fine with ads that are not so much targeted as self-selected.
It's the use of non-observable, non-public info to build and reference an advertising profile where I start to object. It's creepy, and the ads are somehow less relevant.
The one upside I would offer is that with some of them, you can "click" the item to view nutritional facts and ingredients. That's invaluable to me personally, as frequently I want the "least sugary" option available in the machine.
Welcome to an outer ring of hell. Brought to you by... Moore Slaw.
That's quite the brochure. My favorite selling point is the way you can make the machine display products that it's doesn't actually have inside, sell them, and give the punter a digital IOU instead of the soda they tried to buy...
Somehow managing to turn a convenience-driven impulse buy into an additional chore to redeem later.
At the end of the day, there must be some angle I'm not understanding or these features wouldn't actually drive sales. I wonder if the idea is to vend digital products? Drive traffic to nearby physical stores through some kind of targeted digital coupon? Has anyone seen this kind of thing in the wild?
Maybe it's nothing but a scam?
Place it somewhere where there are enough people that haven't tried it before and trick them into buying something they don't want. No one will ever use it more than once.
You're getting a soda's worth of money from every person who is tricked, and some will notice the trick before it happens or hear about it. I'm guessing it's not worth the price of the machine, tech, install costs and opportunity costs of a normal vending machine.
The real scam is the ones that require you to load a card instead of using them directly. Usually seen at newer laundromats and such - arcades, too.
The most scammy make it so you can only load the card in multiples of ten but the machines all cost prime amounts.
All the scooter companies are trying that load by $5 and $10 thing now. Squeezing the last few drops from the stone I guess
Wow... the whole point of a vending machine is to get a soda when you want to have a soda, if you wanted to have a soda later you could get it (usually a lot cheaper) at a supermarket? I hope there's at least a warning message where you can abort your purchase before you get the "voucher" instead of the actual product?
The only thing that makes sense is referring you to a nearby similar machine.
But even that is madness.
I think the era of vending machine is mostly over, but nobody is admitting it.
Why? Aren't they more practical than ever?
Can’t believe they missed the opportunity to have the non-present purchase represented by an NFT. A buzzword overlooked by Marketing!
Speaking only for myself, this would not be long-term profitable for the vending machine company, as the cost of them fixing the boot-sized hole in the machine would be far higher than the $2 they stole from me.
Detecting "gender" by facial recognition on a 21st century uni campus in the USA ... what could _possibly_ go wrong and cause a massive media meltdown?
Needs a TSA full body scanner to get the real demographics of drink sales.
You just assumed someone's gender by the form of their genitals.
/s but...
Oh my god I can’t buy a mars bar without the world trying to send me targeted ads
In Japan, facial recognition vending machines have been used to make product recommendations and collect statisics since 2010:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hwnGrn3go