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Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

Would you be against such a system if the recognition was done entirely locally and it only sent aggregated stats (male, 30-39) to the cloud? I feel like this is coming whether we like it or not, but we (as engineers) can at least try to push it in the right direction.

My guess is it doesn't do proper face recognition but just tries to put you into a bucket. "Oh you are a female teenager, play whatever is popular for that bucket"

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People are already pushing back to one-way collection of such data in public spaces, so I would guess that an implementation that does that and directly acts on it (effectively pigeonholing you in a generic musical preference cohort based on age and sex) would cause an even stronger reaction.

In the Netherlands a couple of those companies that rent out screens with advertising in the public space placed new versions that included a camera above the screen meant for measuring people's reactions to content shown, detecting demographics and mood. After public backlash they promised these were deactivated until the legal situation became clear, but by now they've stuck thick badges over these with their brand name. I guess they got sick of people putting stickers over the camera holes.

The right direction, IMO, is to keep the elevators silent. If someone implements your proposal, someone else will top that with complete tracking and the killer feature being the accurate music choice. I bet nobody would like to sign an agreement or privacy policy to use an elevator though. Less is more in this case.

This is an honest question. Stop acting like asshat redditors with the downvotes. A downvote on this is not a no vote to the question.

For what it's worth, I'm not one of the downvoters but as much as it its an honest question, it also has obvious answers. If you bucket by age/gender/race you will immediately be accused of ageism, sexism and racism. Your statistical model can even be 99.9% accurate too and it won't even matter because it will take just that 0.1% walking into an elevator, becoming offended, posting about it on Twitter and it blowing up in your face.

It's too easy to track where you've been walking inside a shopping mall, and if you're the only person in the elevator, it can trace that you were previously looking at {laptops,refrigerators,lingerie} and play an ad to promote the product to get you to seal the deal... "Today at the lingerie department we have a 20% discount!"

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