Oh come on. Why are we still building technology that further isolates us from each other? You need facial recognition in a store to offer a customer rewards? Why can't you just remember your damn customers, person to person? Why must EVERYTHING be automated by computers?<p>Further isolating us from each other and making us all less familiar with each other is what causes us to divide, and then it leads to people not understanding each other anymore. We all know where that gets us.<p>From a scientific and engineering perspective, this stuff is great, but I don't think it's actually going to make our lives better.
i don't know about the end of Location Based Applications but how will this affect the people when they find out that a business is running something like this?!<p>I for one, would probably stop going to such an establishment .. too much information out there to be misused .. maybe something along the lines of google capturing wifi details while driving around snapping images of roads ..<p>counting the number of visitors is still acceptable. running facial recognition without any opt-in and then talking about comparing them to their facebook profiles to identify them, is pretty much Big Brother stuff. This is such a big privacy red flag ..
A user needing to actively check in is a good thing, as it means the user wants others to know he is checking in there. If a user was to check in to every grocery store, gas station, and so on, it would lose meaning. The point of check ins isn't to track where you are, but instead to show off to your friends you are somewhere cool.
The trend of online tech lately is disturbing. So much of what you are and what you do and who you know is being mined, cross-correlated, modeled and projected to make it easier and easier for the people that want to incentivize your behavior. You don't have to be a conspiracy freak to find this creepy.<p>Can't we find ways to make technology empowering instead? To foster creativity and direct human interaction? I'll admit that things like Meetup etc can in some cases bring people together but the drive to monetize every nook and cranny of our online interactions seems to taint everything.
Wouldn't automatic recognition be a little bit against the psychology of those reward programs? I thought the point was to make you work in exchange for cheaper coffee. The mental effort in doing the work should also fix it in your mind that you can get cheaper coffee by going to place x. If you don't do anything, nothing will register?<p>In the end, I will prefer the cafe with the hot waitress anyway.
People are uncomfortable with this because it inverts the roles of the sensor and the sensed. The participant loses control over their decision whether to check in or not.<p>It reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Are You the Scanner or the Barcode?"
<a href="http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol22?pg=12#pg12" rel="nofollow">http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol22?pg=12#pg12</a>
<i>Even more interesting is the fact that Facebook provides a database of 500mm people and their names from around world. While not all profile pictures are going to be valid in facial recognition software, most will.</i><p>I decided a while back I'd never put my face on my Facebook profile. Here's extra incentive.
Based on my humble knowledge on machine learning, the "concept" of auto-detecting a person's identity based on her/his facebook pictures would be very far from accurate. And accuracy seems to be the key value proposition in this case. Maybe I'm missing something?
It won't happen. Facial recognition isn't that advanced and I doubt this company is going to bring something like this to market without a huge backlash. I have a picture of a trail on my Facebook profile. I suppose I have been a lot of places recently.
Hasn't that technology been around for a while? I remember seeing a driver less car that could detect people. Perhaps someone on HN has a link to the article.
can't we do this without facial recognition?
how about the application passively check-in the user(using gps) based on amount of time he has spent at a particular location(like > 10 mins?)