“Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that ‘over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians’ were scanned into Cadillac Fairview’s database”. Wow.
This Wired article is contradictory. The spokesperson says:
“an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface”
I suppose it’s possible that a sloppy developer would name an executable Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe which merely senses the presence of a face. But it seems like a baldfaced lie when you consider that:
“Invenda sales brochures that promised ‘the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders’ of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting consent.”
Boycott Mars
I already boycott Mars because they are a GMA member and they spent ~$500k lobbying against #GMO labeling – and they have been blackballed for using child slave labor – and Mars supports Russia. This is another good reason to #boycottMars.
Update
Apparently a LemmyBug replaced the article URL with a picture URL. The article is here:
https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/
The vending machine pic is here:
https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/2041d717-7cd7-4393-94f3-96aa87817aa7.jpeg
The way to protest this: bring a sharpie marker and mark all the black spots in the frame. Also any black screw holes. Anywhere a camera can be. Let them become frustrated at maintaince costs until finally they give up on putting hidden cameras in places.
The best part is if a machine doesn’t have hidden cameras, this will not cause any maintenance issues, so lower upkeep. Only the shitty hidden camera machines will experience problems.
I guess the rub is that a light sensor which determines how bright to make the LCD is probably indistinguishable from a CCD. If that is darkened then it would darken the screen potentially on machines with no CCD. Although you could test it by covering the spot briefly to see if the screen dims.
You could just use the camera as a light sensor.
Ah, right… so how can @[email protected]’s team of activists limit their destruction to the camera functionality? I wonder if a laser could perhaps burn the CCD enough to ruin image capture but not to the extent that light sensing fails.
I guess the more practical attack would be to superglue a piece of transparent diffusing film over it. Light would still get through but it would just be a blur. Diffusing film can be harvested from LCD screens we often see in dumpsters lately. Or even just that milky type of Scotch tape. Along the same lines, a scribe could be used to scratch up the plastic sheet that protects the CCD.
All of those require more materials than a simple pocket marker. We travel light and innocuous.
Right but the marker would cause problems for non-intrusive vending machines which only use a light sensor to set the display intensity. Along the lines of that simplicity, a thin smudge of chapstick would do well… simple and lightweight. Light could enter but not an image.