It was an entirely valid question: “hey so why do the stupid m&m machines have facial recognition?” Below it, two photos posted on Reddit this past February showed an error message on a vending machine screen at the University of Waterloo. It looked like the machine’s facial recognition software wasn’t working. The Reddit thread helped spark a campus newspaper article that then set off a flurry of national and international headlines: “Ontario university students freaked out about facial recognition vending machines”; “Vending machines got caught peeping on snackers.”
There’s something disconcerting about a sophisticated piece of surveillance technology deployed for something as banal as selling candy. Invenda, the Swiss company behind the machines, issued a statement to the CBC that no cameras were inside the machines and the software was designed for facial analysis, not recognition—it was there to “determine if an anonymous individual faces the device, for what duration, and approximates basic demographic attributes unidentifiably.” (The CBC report pointed out that Invenda’s CEO had used the term “facial recognition” in a previous promo video.) The Waterloo Reddit thread opened up a can of other questions. Why would a company collect this information to begin with? How many of the mundane transactions that make up our daily lives are being mined for intimate biometric data without our knowledge or approval? And how far will this technology go?
