[ffriend]

Thanks for the detailed comment. Couple clarifying questions if you don't mind:

- do you know that loyalty cards are often used in stores to collect customer data (a kind of offline cookie)? do you consider it a bad/dangerous/unethical or does it sound ok for you?

- if instead of a camera there was a person looking at customers and recording his observation, would you feel bad about it?

[discreteevent]

I'm not the parent commenter but:

- do you know that loyalty cards are often used in stores to collect customer data (a kind of offline cookie)? do you consider it a bad/dangerous/unethical or does it sound ok for you?

Yes I do know that loyalty cards are used to collect data. I think most people do. I don't take loyalty cards for this reason and I'm glad that they are opt in although there is some financial pressure to take them.

- if instead of a camera there was a person looking at customers and recording his observation, would you feel bad about it?

I would feel bad about it and I think the person should ask my permission first.

[ffriend]

> I would feel bad about it and I think the person should ask my permission first.

But if that person just memorizes customer reactions to understand how people on average react to particular products or actions, that's ok, right? Because this is what sellers and business owners do to improve their product. So is it about human-to-human interaction or some more subtle detail? I'm biased here, so sorry if I miss something obvious in this situation.

[abalone]

It's not subtle. If there was an employee standing next to you or following you around the store with a clipboard taking notes on you and your facial expressions, only then would you have something approaching an apples to apples comparison. Stop pretending that's normally "what sellers and owners do" and you're just automating it. Customers Do Not Want.

[abalone]

Loyalty cards are opt in. Security surveillance can be unsettling but customers understand its purpose and limited scope. What you're proposing is more invasive, and most people would not appreciate it if they knew about it.

Look, give up trying to justify it. Customers don't want it. You should find another application for this technology.

[ffriend]

Well, I definitely do have other applications for it. For example, I know that similar software has been used in labs to estimate people's reaction to videos and game features, in mobile applications to improve interaction with a user, etc.

My interest to offline applications comes from personal experience: recently we demonstrated our product (not emotion recognition, but also capturing user's face) on an exposition. People came to our stand, used the product (so they clearly opted-in), asked questions, etc. After 2 days, we asked a girl at the stand "What do people think about the product"? "Well, in general, they are interested" she answered. Not much info, right? Definitely less informative than "65% expressed mild interest, 20% had no reaction and 5% found it disgusting, especially this feature".

So I don't try to justify this use case - my life doesn't depend on it - but I find it stupid not to try to understand your clients better when it doesn't introduce a moral conflict.

[consz]

Loyalty cards are opt-in, and it's common knowledge that its explicit purpose is to track information about yourself -- so I think a lot more people find them (or at least their existence) acceptable.