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Comment by dfine | Hacker News Reader

I am a PM at Placemeter. We do not "use facial recognition software" in our algorithms, as Density's website claims of video-based systems. None of our algorithms use biometric markers for our counting—we're essentially the same "dumb" counters as Density's IR with the added advantage of accuracy and area of coverage.

Placemeter does much more than pay lip service to privacy. We pride ourself on our privacy efforts. If you want to lear more about them, @afar email me: david@placemeter.com

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I am curious. Particularly with your new sensor. It sounded like much of the video processing happens on the unit itself, meaning faces never reach Placemeter servers. Is it accurate to say that you're only getting counts and movement data?

My other question is how you derive count without uniquely identifying someone. If I'm entering a shop and a PM sensor sees me, will it know when I leave?

Great questions.

1) the processing is happening aboard the sensor, counts are what are sent back to the servers

2) we don't do unique identification like that. We use object detection, which is different than using unique biometric markers like face detection. That means that we can track a person or a car within a frame of view, but not if they exit and re-enter the frame like in the case you described.

Does Density still use wifi pinging for part of its counts?

That's really interesting. Given a certain level of granularity, would it be possible for a person to have a unique object signature? I guess at that point, you'd just use a face. Just curious.

No wifi pinging. After Apple almost killed us a year ago with their MAC address policy change and we realized there was significant push back on privacy, we dropped the technology altogether.

Not quite sure I understand your question. We store counts, not individual object IDs, so at an individual granularity it would be the same as your IR device counting one person.

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