Boycotts

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Using your consumer power to refuse to feed the profits of adversaries of humanity. Marketplace baddies who cause disproportionate harm to the planet or people.

Who to boycott, why they are being boycotted (or why you personally boycott them), and how to boycott them (if it’s not obvious).

Also welcome: discussion on how to organize and track your boycotts. E.g. whether it’s a special tool or app, or whether it’s a series of text files to GREP.

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(Canada) An M&M vending machine error revealed facial recognition was used to illegally snoop on students (boycott Mars if you aren’t already!) (infosec.pub)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8862635

“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

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I think that's a bit of old news

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yes, but it's still good to remind people that they're trying every way to garher data about you and sell it and also inform those who might have not seen it the first time around.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This is not a news forum. It’s a boycott organisation and support forum. Do your boycotts tend to last less than 1 year? That’s not really impactful. (which is not to say impact is the only reason to boycott… I boycott just to ensure that I am not part of the problem, impact or not)

I have been boycotting Mars at least since 2018 when I found out they spent $½ million lobbying against GMO labeling in the US. Even if they were to turn that around and pay more money to lobby for GMO transparency, I would still boycott their vending machines. Not just because they got caught in a data abuse scandal, but because they lied about it, which means they cannot be trusted with technology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

By about a year, looks like. It was still news to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I worked for a place that wanted to do face and gesture recognition with a Kinect in a kiosk. The devs had objections, but were ignored. We also didn't launch anything and the exec team got canned, so there's that.

It's entirely possible to activate the screen on "I think that's a face" as well as have some local-only software guess age/sex and mix with engagement data for analytics. Whether anything is captured, fingerprinted, stored, or uploaded... anyone's guess.

It's a little skeezy because it's non-obvious, but doing the anonymized metrics isn't more invasive than someone with a clipboard watching and taking notes on who buys or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Of course, then some dumb manager fuck decides to outsource that local software to "the cloud", and you've basically got a spy camera again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Child exploitation is another good reason to boycott Mars

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

People can afford vending machine prices?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I ain't in Canada, but my college had pretty much those exact same vending machines. Don't know if the spying was the reason they disappeared, but they didn't last very long before being removed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Fuck Mars, worst planet. Too dusty.