Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

Landlubber77 t1_j6dwv6r wrote

Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet.

36

AudibleNod t1_j6dwwja wrote

Can't they also pick up bluetooth IDs and see how long someone lingers and where?

if not, I'm sorry for giving them the idea.

24

TinyChaco t1_j6dwyhj wrote

As if I needed more reasons to hate shopping.

21

human8264829264 OP t1_j6dxdmk wrote

Probably, learned about this in a marketing class last week when they where telling us that sometimes they deploy those mannequins and spy on shoppers in real time to analyze their behavior and product reactions, and that includes listening to their conversations.

6

OuttatimepartIII t1_j6dxtaf wrote

It's like these people take the wrong kind of notes after watching prophetic dystopian science fiction

589

SCMtnGuy t1_j6dygr1 wrote

Yeah, many of them use already bluetooth beacons. You don't even need to connect. They use signal strength and UUIDs to know your proximity and identity, then this is tied back to all the information harvested from other sources to profile you.

All of this should be illegal. But, until Congress grows some balls and passes actual privacy laws, this is another good reason to keep bluetooth, wifi, NFC, and other modes of transmission off on your phone unless you're specifically using it for something at that moment.

29

shogi_x t1_j6dzosr wrote

> So, when will these mannequins start analyzing you? They might already be. Not only does Almax sell the EyeSee to stores oversees, it already has one client in the U.S. "It is already in some stores in the U.S., but I cannot disclose the client."

TL;DR: this is not widespread and may never be.

190

shogi_x t1_j6e1imk wrote

I can only find a handful of articles from around the same time period. I'm guessing this is tech that never really proved its value so it didn't catch on widely. TBH they're probably just using regular security cameras and Bluetooth beacons, if they're analyzing this at all.

38

Ohbc t1_j6e48ri wrote

Good luck analysing my resting bitch face

15

ionhowto t1_j6e4g3c wrote

Whisper an ad, 5% off your next order.

4

BigJayPee t1_j6e6day wrote

As someone who has worked for several small businesses, I can tell you these people are the worst people to work for. I don't feel pity for them.

Instead, they need to have a reason for me to patronize their business instead of buying online. Do they have a unique product I can't get elsewhere? Do they sell thing cheaper? Do they pay their employees a living wage? Is the local community better off with their existence, or are they a burden?

6

Low_Soul_Coal t1_j6e6xec wrote

Well you’re looking at their point of view incorrectly.

The people that are taking the notes are the people that would end up in the high towers where the sunlight reaches.

So warnings to us are roadmaps to them.

205

Safe-Link-7590 t1_j6e84pm wrote

Somebody needs to hack run a white hat security test on those mannequins. Then make all of them play the robots by Kraftwerk and then end with a rickroll

0

pirateclem t1_j6e8t2n wrote

This is why when I masturbate in a store I look the mannequins directly in the eyes.

114

HHS2019 t1_j6e9f6q wrote

Oh, man. This is going to change everything about Mannequin 3. It will no longer be the capstone of an adorable rom-com fantasy trilogy. It will obviously become a high-tech thriller with hackers; probably the Russians. Thumbs down!

2

CarelessHisser t1_j6e9s96 wrote

And they're neither widespread nor cheap.

Apocalypse baiting.

1

PeachSnappleOhYeah t1_j6eafsf wrote

what small business did you work for??

i grew up working in my family's small retail business, knowing all the other small businesses in town; and small business does far more for customers, employees, and community than Huge Corp 9/10

5

WiebeKong t1_j6eb203 wrote

Can ai give us health care instead?

5

TransManNY t1_j6eb2fp wrote

Reason why I still wear a mask in stores.

8

Taykeyero t1_j6ecbm8 wrote

Yay another reason to avoid brick and mortar and expand my general isolation.

1

_VaultOfGlass_ t1_j6eeanp wrote

Good thing my permanent expression is the "idgaf" face.

Good luck judging my opinions on things lmao

1

BillTowne t1_j6eew4l wrote

Are they required to post a notice to the public of filming?

1

TinyChaco t1_j6eg9z5 wrote

It's really just pants and shoes for me. I'll buy all my t shirts online, but if I don't try on pants or shoes before I buy I end up with ill fitting clothing I'll have to send back.

3

pseudocultist t1_j6egngk wrote

This kind of tech came too early. It generated a mountain of data which no one could parse let alone use for any good ends. No integration with other systems.

Today we're doing AI data lakes where we just pipe in all sorts of raw data and let the AI do the work . It's still catching on in enterprise settings. Once that's in place, they can take another shot at tech like this, piping the data into the lake where it can be put to use. Plus the hardware has dropped in price quite a bit.

I would say expect a second round of this stuff in another 3-5 years, and it'll be much more successful.

14

Amerlis t1_j6ejgoq wrote

So all you folks that’s pulling pants down to check anatomical correctness, yeah it’s recorded. Forever.

1

phoenixthekat t1_j6ekx58 wrote

We are definitely creating AI that will destroy us one step at a time.

1

loquacious706 t1_j6emy07 wrote

Yeah, and they could like... Just ask me.

If there was a poll next to the mannequins I would be happy to let them know how I feel. What it generally boils down to is I want longer tops, deeper pockets, and stop cutting random holes in everything. Can their dystopian video surveillance catch all of that?

24

BrokenEye3 t1_j6en45x wrote

I'll bet the Nestene Consciousness is excited

2

BigJayPee t1_j6ep722 wrote

I worked for a family owned escape room. And I worked for a family owned Ashley furniture franchise.

Your experience was with your own families business. They can't exactly just get rid of you. Being hired on to someone else's family business is something I wouldn't recommend. At the ashley store, I was only there for 10 days (3 days training and 7 selling). I finished with higher sales than all the family members except 1, but I was let go for "low numbers" even though I was 3rd out of 9 sales people my first week on the sales floor.

The escape room, well, the actual owner was hardly ever there, saw him maybe once a month. My issue with them was the training. They had someone train me as I went, but she just kinda showed me as a situation popped up, not beforehand. The owners would show up and just yell at me for something I had no idea was even something I was supposed to do, and neither did the girl training me. I would get in trouble. She wouldn't. Just showed huge amounts of favoritism that never happens at any corporate place I've worked.

I'm sure some are great, hell, I owned a food truck before, and my wife owned a froyo shop before. but I'm not just going to blindly support a small business just because they are small, I need them to provide something that puts them ahead of the larger competition. This is capitalism. Competition is supposed to be a thing.

5

SCMtnGuy t1_j6eus5i wrote

These beacons are also sometimes used in window displays, seasonal displays, end of row displays, and other non-mannequin ways, so it's not just mannequins you have to worry about. Shopping malls and grocery stores are also turning into marketing panopticons. Basically, everyone in real life wants to imitate the level of customer spying Amazon can achieve, and it gets buzz with senior management because it promises enhanced revenue. I suspect it's actually mostly useless garbage data, honestly, but I do my best to deny data harvesting from me anyway.

It sucks, though... I shouldn't have to be at war with my own consumer electronics products, yet I am. Keeping up with the ways in which advertisers and marketers, and all their middle men, abuse access to my information is tiring, and many days I feel like just chucking my phone into the nearest ravine and telling everyone if they need to get ahold of me, write me a letter, the ancient on-paper kind.

This is especially depressing to me, personally, because I was on the team that developed the first successful fully integrated digital cell phone controller IC. All of us engineers were enthusiastic about it and imagined a future of information at your fingertips, the greatest library of human knowledge in every pocket, and the positive effects that this democratization of information access would have. But, this was before the rise of surveillence capitalism, before gatekeeping on technical knowledge (go fuck yourself, Elsevier) and before the new cold war of social media driven disinformation campaigns.

Now it's all garbage, just a big, sad pile of bullshit information being jacked from everyone and uselessly twaddled with "AI" and "Machine Learning" algorithms to produce dubuous marketing information that primarily serves to justify legions of bullshit jobs, in the Graeber sense of the word.

14

SCMtnGuy t1_j6evf77 wrote

You mean the online shopping that collects and aggregates more data on you than even the most advanced spy mannequin could ever hope to do?

I guess if you decide you can't win, you might as well surrender...

9

bullybullybully t1_j6f390j wrote

I work in retail design and technology and can say that, while this exists it is far from wide spread. There are many more effective and accurate ways of capturing customer data in use. One of the hard to decipher points with smart displays is that it is difficult to tell from audience reactions what exactly the customer is reacting to. Could be the whole outfit, a single item, the mannequin pose or visual merchandising elements, etc.

5

SolarSmelter t1_j6f9nex wrote

There won’t be any dystopian overcoming for them when I make grimaced facial contortions directed at their mannecameras to analyze. Their system will self-destruct with all the expressions I can cycle through in a second. I’ll be standing at the foundation of their ivory towers kicking them until they fall, all the while my doo doo farts in the act rise stinky clouds above their glass ceilings. Instead of the sun, they will see a gaseous brown piece of what I did to a glazed turkey dinner the night before with the many visages of my profile superimposed over their disastrous nightmare of a victorious sky.

27

gnochii_ t1_j6fge5b wrote

Nice. More manmade horrors beyond my comprehension.

3

MpVpRb t1_j6fj5ni wrote

>facial expressions analysis

Bullshit, useless nonsense sold to clueless managers by sharp con artists

3

Broccoli-Basic t1_j6fkldx wrote

Can I not accept the cookies at the door? Guess I'll be wearing a surgical mask forever.

1

Fonty57 t1_j6fljgz wrote

Last time I tell a mannequin they have a nicely molded ass.

1

Lelabear t1_j6fmbk7 wrote

Knew a guy about 10 years ago who was an audio engineer that got a job with Wal-Mart designing subliminal sound devices to put in the end caps at the stores to make customers want to buy that merchandise. Never went in a box store again without headphones.

10

FatQuack t1_j6fnbhy wrote

Expression analysis indicates this man is attempting to have sex with the mannequin. We're adding that to the demographics.

0

flpacsnr t1_j6fnxua wrote

I guess I’m adding mannequins to the list of random objects I flip off.

13

Cetun t1_j6fs05t wrote

Ah yes, the mannequin will take the opinions of homeless people and mall goths and hold that data on the same level as their target demo. Sounds like a winning strat.

0

theycmeroll t1_j6fs6mx wrote

This practice has been around for a long time. I worked for a company back in 2003 installing digital advertising screens in Walmart that has a camera in them behind a plastic panel that did the same thing.

2

PeachSnappleOhYeah t1_j6ftw9k wrote

ok. that's fair. and to be fair to my point, it doesn't sound like you've had long enough history working in small business, which might not be your fault. i think your experience isn't typical.

how many Fed Ex little league baseball fields, or Amazon sponsored local parades do you know of? in my towns, local businesses do a lot for the community. Many people work good jobs and fair pay and hours.

but i don't disagree there are less than stellar examples out there, like everything else. sorry to hear about your story, because small business is so important to the middle class.

6

4badsanta t1_j6fvigd wrote

With the new AI they will chase you down and make the sale

0

koenigsaurus t1_j6fw8sn wrote

I would just like to be able to exist in public without my every movement analyzed and sold, holy fuck

28

starwarsman05 t1_j6fx7ld wrote

>There won’t be any dystopian overcoming for them when I make grimaced facial contortions directed at their mannecameras to analyze. Their system will self-destruct with all the expressions I can cycle through in a second.

hahaha

3

lolokaydudewhatever t1_j6fxi7k wrote

This is why I avoid the store, i shop online so they can invade my privacy the old fashioned way

2

Flemtality t1_j6fygmk wrote

This unethical technology was first pioneered by the morally bankrupt people at Gillette over twenty years ago. At that time people didn't like it and spoke out against it, which of course did absolutely nothing, and here we are.

Just know that somewhere out there is video of you every time you ever walked near a Gillette razor display at a big box store this century, and some creepy fuck working for Gillette probably spanked his frank to that video.

4

erishun t1_j6g626g wrote

Disclaimer: one tech start up has created a preview demo model that can do these things and now they are trying to find retail clients who will be interested in swapping out their current mannequins with these.

These aren’t in mass production and this is a glorified ad for the Italian company producing these.

0

weirdkid71 t1_j6g8os3 wrote

This is from 2012. I tried searching on EyeSee Mannequin and I found a bunch of news articles also from 2012, but nothing much since. I did find one article in 2015 about how they were incorporating speech recognition to determine if nearby customers are talking about what is on the mannequin.

So, either the tech was so expensive and unreliable that the company Almax went under and nobody else bothered going down this path, OR it was wildly successful and the tech has "gone dark" somehow. Though the real answer is probably somewhere between store owners found a cheaper way to do this by upgrading existing camera equipment, or because "malls are dying" nobody gave a crap anymore.

FWIW, back in the early 2010's there was a lot of talk of stores spying on you, using your phone's bluetooth or wifi radio to track your movements, too. But then Apple decided to randomize your phones wifi MAC address when searching for access points, kinda killing that idea.

2

CrouchingToaster t1_j6gdjlh wrote

One of the big selling points of a mannequin is that they are cheap. This might catch on as like one or two mannequins in a store has this that corporate has the stores use to gauge customer reaction to a sale or a new line being released, but I highly doubt this is gonna become a standard mannequin.

1

The_Derpening t1_j6gi2hk wrote

Ah so on some server somewhere there's footage of me squeezing mannequin boob and giggling like a 12 year old boy. Best regards to the poor sucker who has to watch that, get a real job.

1

MegaWattson t1_j6gsbu9 wrote

It says right in the article “The EyeSee does not store any images or record video. It also doesn't record audio, though it will have the ability to listen for trends soon.”

Sooooo what exactly is it doing if not recording anything?

1

arPie74 t1_j6gvusi wrote

If a store like Kohls begins to notice that the vast majority of their customers are not in a demographic that listens to the kind of muzak they plague us with and adjusts just that one thing, it will be worth it.

1

Marine__0311 t1_j6gwqrm wrote

They've had store mannequins with security cameras in them for decades.

1

jimmyhoke t1_j6gzpvv wrote

I hate this. If I see one I'm going to make weird faces and stare to deliberately polute the data. I suggest you all do the same.

2

herbw t1_j6h6jg5 wrote

I wanta send out some mimes to those stores....

1

Johnsnowookie t1_j6hiotw wrote

Well that's it boys, it's the beginning of the end. It's been fun but it's the robots time now

1

ProfessionalFace1443 t1_j6i2ke6 wrote

What’s great is that this kind of malarkey is illegal in Illinois. Stores would have to make customers sign a disclosure before entering in order to use this kind of crap. IL was lucky to pass a biometric privacy law in 2009 before Big Tech really got their lobbying monster put together. I doubt there will ever be another law like it in the US again; Google et al. will see to that.

1

Kizmo2 t1_j6iudqn wrote

Minority Report is upon us.

1