It saddens me that there are people in our profession for whom implementing such a thing presents no moral or ethical dilemma.
I'm not saying there isn't an absolute right and wrong, but I certainly don't find this as abhorrent as most people here, apparently.
I suppose a banner saying "you are being tracked" on tom of such a billboard could have quite an interesting effect. Come to think of it I've seen "Smile, you're being recorded!" in some shops.
IIRC the countermeasure is quite easy and requires something like a LED and a battery, but I may be wrong it's been 10+ years.
There are laws and customs around public places and what may be done there. E.g. depending on your local laws, if you're in public, people can usually take pictures of you and there's also nothing you can do about that.
Don't like it? Petition to have the laws changed. This is how we deal with such things in a democracy.
Trying to guild the engineers who build this system is both IMO wrong, but also completely pointless in terms of real-world effect.
Quite the opposite, in France "le droit à l'image" is a privacy right that allows anyone to request that any picture of them being taken to be deleted.
If you're not sharing this position it could be that you are younger or have been subjected to the conditioning of population by industries to make intrusive surveillance technology acceptable to them which has been going on for at least 15+ years afaik.
"if you don't agree with me you're either a kid or brainwashed" - nice.
From what I can tell this is anonymous analysis and classification - this kind of info is useful and I don't mind one bit that it's being collected - in fact if the data is accurate then I like it - I can provide feedback without effort. I prefer it much more than being spammed by pollsters or a service tracking and associating behavior with my profile.
I don't think that's true. Most of us tech-geeks are worried about privacy way more than the average person. I personally don't see this particular use case as too problematic, depending on what is done with the data - as others in the thread have pointed out, you're in a public place, other people could be taking pictures of you or writing down information about you, and I don't think most people are worried about that either.
My view is that as long as the technology exists or can exist, it will be developed used, so complaining about the people building it is completely fruitless. If you really dislike how it's used, help pass laws against it! Don't go around guilting people for building this stuff.
The difference is scale. It would be prohibitively expensive for every pizza shop to hire someone to collect demographics of passerby. These systems can run on a Raspberry Pi.
It's fine to speculate about and individual's reasoning for why they believe what they believe but it's entirely useless for determining what the majority believe.
Correction: Someone will use it for evil. This kind of tech is hot stuff for people engaged in evil.
As an ethical programmer, I'd be sure to incorporate security, anonymization, and be able to draw the line so that I can help businesses make more money (since that's what they pay me for), and advance technology at the same time.
This is only unethical when it's used in a system that infers more information aside from general demographics (which, BTW nearly everywhere collects), and makes them vulnerable to interception outside of the pizza company.
and from the same guy:
"Don’t ask how you’re going to pay your rent working ethically. Ask why you’re open to behaving unethically in the first place." https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-and-paying-rent-86e972c...