nicerdicer

Back in the 90s our school had one room with a permantently installed TV set. Class was taking part in this room once a week. When we all behaved - and we did! - we were allowed to watch MTV in this room for the last remaining 15 minutes of the lesson. It was the time where boy groups and Euro Dance music was at its peak. For us 5th or 6th-graders this was the most important thing every week.

There is an eerie resemblence between the smallest neuron and the largest structure in the universe - Galaxy Filament

Ads in, before, and after videos suck.

But wouldn’t be an ad, which is displayed during a paused video one of the least annoying? Because, when I pause a video, I’m usually doing something else (bathroom break for instance, or, when staying at the computer, doing something in another browser tab or in a different program) and I’m absent from the video. Also, I can mute sound easily (one push of a key on the keyboard - which is a workflow that has to be executed then in addition to simply pausing the video and therefore would be annoying).

Or did I miss anything else crucial? Do you pause videos and stare at the paused video without doing anything else?

Anyway, this probably won’t be a problem if you use an ad blocker. Or if you download the video.

This would be the Movie Posters, A.I. generated:

@[email protected] draw for me Space ship people get up from sleeping coffin and have eat. Computer woman find strange noisings on planet and astronauts go to seeing. Astronauts find big elephant man who dead then find too many egg. Astronaut is possess by egg demon and new egg demon is come when eat bad noodle. Seven friends and cat all try to find egg demon before space ship go home but is hard working. Who will life to escaping? Who is bad milk blood robot? Scream not working because space make deaf.

style: albedo

@[email protected] draw for me Space ship people get up from sleeping coffin and have eat. Computer woman find strange noisings on planet and astronauts go to seeing. Astronauts find big elephant man who dead then find too many egg. Astronaut is possess by egg demon and new egg demon is come when eat bad noodle. Seven friends and cat all try to find egg demon before space ship go home but is hard working. Who will life to escaping? Who is bad milk blood robot? Scream not working because space make deaf.

style: albedo

Correct. The said vending machine was collecting data without users consent. And because it was facial recognition data it means that the collected data can be tied to an individual.

It would have been different if the collected data was just a counter which indcated the number of users of that machine. These kind of data could not have been tied to a specific individual.

That is correct. Switzerland is not a part of the European Union. The manufacturer, Invenda, is located in Switzerland. That is where their headquarters are. It might be possible that their vending machines are produced within the EU (another country where production costs are lower). It might be possible that these specific models (those who offer data collection) are designed for markets outside of EU.

They advertise their product as “Made in EU” (see brochure). This could be made on purpose to implicate that their data collection meets GDPR requirements, leading to believe that everything is compliant with the law.

Bad news, the manufacturer is located in Switzerland and, as stated in the brochure, they advertise their product as “Made in EU”. Probably to implicate that any data which will be collected and processed will be under the terms of GDPR.

I haven’t looked up the terms regarding GDPR, but I assume that their data collection is somewhat “compliant” with GDPR, which does not necessaryly mean anything. It can just mean that data is not stored locally, albeit it will be send to the manufacturer (but probably entcrypted). However, under GDPR you can enforce your right of deletion of the collected data - that is, if you know that data about you has been collected.

What makes this issue so severe is that it would have never been detected that data has been collected and processed, if it weren’t for a malfunction.

Edit: grammar, spelling

The worst part of all is that no one would think of the fact that a vending machine is performing facial recognition techniques, because in general it is assumed that a vending machine is a mechanical device, as it has been in the past. There is not any user benefit in that.

I researched the manufacuter and in their brochure (see page 6) of a similar vending machine it is revealed what data can be processed:

Among the worst data sets are:

• product demographics
• measuring of foot traffic
• gender/ age/ etc.

Bonus: on page 7 of the product brochure they introduce an app which allows the customer to make purchases directly from their smatphone, with features like

• consumer engagement through gamification, interactive marketing, gifting, scratch-and-win receipts, product sampling and cross selling

“What do customers get?”

• a fun and engaging payment process

Finally! I always thought that payment is not fun enough. What a time to be alive.