A software engineer works on a facial recognition program that identifies people when they wear a face mask at the development lab of the Chinese electronics manufacturer Hanwang Technology.An M&M vending machine recently reminded us that our faces are like candy for companies – tempting, but ultimately unnecessary to ingest.
The claim that scanning student faces didn’t count as collecting personally identifiable information is an interpretation of Canada’s private sector privacy law that conflicts with our regulators’ recent investigation into a similar incident at Cadillac Fairview malls . The University of Waterloo expressed surprise that the machines were running facial analytics and said they’d remove them.
Consider the setting: How reasonable is it to subject students on campus to corporate surveillance? Even if best practices were followed in terms of procurement, there is a concern over passive surveillance of students without proper understanding or public conversation. The fairness of facial analytics and surveillance technology on campus should be constructively debated, not randomly deployed without notice.
Would a “reasonable person” consider that it is appropriate to scan young people’s faces when they are buying candy from a vending machine? The company seems to have a curiosity about the age and gender of their clientele, which is somewhat comical when you consider the narrow age band of students on a university campus.