>Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card?
to scan the QR/bar code that's on the card
to scan the QR/bar code that's on the card
Perhaps the most famous: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/21/16339122/e...
To the contrary, it's an essential measure for helping to track down theft and fraud.
Every self-checkout takes a photo of your face. Every ATM. And basically every store where you check out with a cashier has security cameras capturing your face from angles.
So there is no reason why engineers would want to angle the camera downwards.
I expect to be informed that recording will be occuring given I live in a two party consent state.
There is an expectation of privacy in certain circumstances, ex law office, Drs office, and the break room (given discussing working conditions in a break room is a protected activity where recording is disallowed)
Every customer support hotline I've ever dialed prefaces the message with 'this conversation may be recorded'. Most ATMs have a video surveillance tag somewhere nearby.
Regardless, if Amazon bought commercial products with recording devices and installed them in the break room, that's ultimately Amazon's responsibility. Perhaps it was an honest mistake, but IMHO Amazon has failed to Earn Trust and Disagree and Commit to following the law when it comes to labor regulations
That has nothing to do with audio recording, which seems to be what you're talking about. I'm not talking about audio, nor is the original article in question, nor the coffee machine in question.
The concept of "two party consent" only applies to conversations. They don't apply to video recordings.
As far as I am aware, two-party consent is specifically for audio recordings, not recordings without an audio component.
It is also way cheaper to get off-the-shelf tablets with camera to embed into systems, then add extra hardware to read just barcodes.
if you have been to a secure Amazon facility you know that there are cameras in every room and in every hall and at every point of entry and exit. Management appears to make no excuses about using those for every possible purpose. The people that work there seem in "constant compliance" mode, and there are more than a few wrecked individuals "just making a living" .. is this a social pattern for the most successful companies to emulate? It seems to be much more like the Ottoman Empire than any Western thing I know of..
However, they can't handle the information density of a 2d barcode and the transformations needed to scan a 2d barcode at an arbitrary orientation and reconstruct the original information are more finicky than including what is now a cheap digital camera. The difference between a digital still camera and a digital video is how often you read it out.
You can get a camera for under $10 ( https://www.adafruit.com/product/5733 ) and the ease of using that in combination with a library that can handle 2d barcodes in any orientation is much less work to use than trying to make a scanning laser system to read a 2d barcode.