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Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. Facebook is just beginning to monetize the value of what they have created.

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You can make the "just getting started" argument for just about any company.

What you describe does not seem to require the involvement of Facebook. It doesn't even seem to require cameras. Just ask them to swipe their credit card to start using the automated ordering system.

Not any company. Every decade has a foundational technology upon which most of the economic growth of that period is based. 1987 - 1997 was the decade of the personal computer. 1997 - 2007 was the decade of the world wide web. 2007 - 2017 was the decade of mobile which is just starting to get mature. 2017 - 2027 will be the decade of AI / autonomy. Who will be the companies that excel at AI? The ones that can invest the most engineering dollars, and the ones that have access to large datasets for training. So I suppose you could say all tech companies with large datasets are just getting started given the growth I imagine we’ll see in the next decade.

Also I’m talking about tracking someone using their face, without them interacting with any systems at all or even checking out. Sure you could do implement a simpler similar system with credit cards but people have many credit cards that change often and so it would be difficult to get an accurate full profile of an individual. By contrast Facebooks AI would be universal and would be able to look at what you ordered at Wendy’s and use that to optimize the menu that is presented to the user for optimal conversions, even if you’ve never been in a mcdonald’s before. This is nice if you’re mcdonald’s but if you’re a small restaurant it’s a game changer. I don’t even know if Facebook is working on this but you can imagine them making a lot of money offering these types of services.

Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.

They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good.

How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?

Less than 5% of their revenue for sure.

Changing the menu "subtly" is still changing the menu. How does it work with everyone else in the store, are you going to compute optimal clusters on the fly? How are people going to react when the menu is morphing in front of them? Are franchisees expected to pay for all the hardware and compute involved?

Sorry, but I'm just not buying the vision. Facebook has ridden this incredible wave, first of investors spooging themselves with excitement over the potential value of all the data collected, then the wave of advertisers coming in and spending massive amounts with very questionable ROI. Long term everyone is going to get more sophisticated and realize there are cases where "would you like fries with that?" simply performs better once you factor in the weaknesses of comprehensive data-driven in-store advertising (cost, bandwidth, alienation, noisy data, key data out of band, etc, etc).

In Australia we have ordering kiosks now at a lot of stores, so maybe that would be one avenue where it's easier to cater to a customer's specific tastes by warping the menu a bit.

I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, just that it's an option.

While it doesn’t involve a fancy camera, you’re describing a loyalty card.

The merchant tracks your buying habits, and in return you get a variety of promotions. Square does this, FiveStars does this, Ritual does this, Clover and every other “connected” register company do this, Starbucks app does this.

The fancy camera, while interesting, is not a necessary aspect of this. Customization when the customer is physically in the store is nice, but the real money seems to be in getting that customer to the store.

Society needs to figure out if that should be illegal. It's the secret manipulation of people's reality to get them to do things that are against the interests of their wallets and health. Very few people would consent to that if they understood how it works, especially at Internet scale. I think it would be easy to reach a dystopia if society travels too far along that path.

Facebook, the company != Facebook, the platform

I think the arguments in the article, at least most of them, are focusing on the platform.

People who walk into a McDonalds will spend money there. How much more would they spend at that hypothetical CreepyMcDonalds?

Ad targeting has it's place for certain applications, but it is easy to overestimate its impact.

Back in ancient Venice, everyone wore masks in public.

GDPR will prevent that unless there's an active opt-in, so you can strike out EU citizens from that scenario.

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