An Ontario university is pulling dozens of vending machines that were tracking the age and gender of customers in the latest example of pushback against technology that tests the boundaries of privacy rules.
The move comes amid opposition from University of Waterloo students, who became aware of the technology after a Reddit user spotted an on-screen error message on one of the machines earlier this month, about an apparent problem with its facial recognition program.
“The natural question that follows there is, ‘Why does it have a facial recognition app? How can this error even exist?'” said River Stanley, a fourth-year computer science and
