A Canadian university will remove several M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after an error message on one machine revealed to students that it was secretly collecting facial recognition data without their consent.
Students attending the University of Waterloo became aware of the technology after a Reddit user posted an image of the error message displayed on a machine earlier this month.
The message read, “Invenda.Vending. FacialRecognition.App.exe — Application error.”
River Stanley, a fourth-year computer science and business student, investigated the incident and wrote about the discovery in the campus journal MathNews.
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“The natural question that follows there is, ‘Why does it have a facial recognition app? How can this error even exist?'” he said. “We wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the application error. There’s no warning here.”
Students on campus began to share the story and it has sparked outrage.
“[I’m] kind of shocked just because it’s a vending machine, and I don’t really think they need to be taking facial recognition,” student Dilpreet Sandhu told CTV News.
“It is a university campus, so I feel like the
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