Saturday, February 24, 2024

A university is trying to remove smart vending machines from campus because of fears the machines are collecting facial-recognition data

Ars has a summary, the vending machine company says it's complying with rules and not storing data:

The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.

"Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?" SquidKid47 pondered.