The Brazilian wing of Burger King introduced a surveillance expertise advertising stunt this week referred to as the “Hangover Whopper,” celebrating the booze-filled days between Christmas and New Yr’s with facial recognition. All you need to do is maintain your bleary-eyed visage as much as a digital camera, and the corporate says its face-scanning software program will choose how hungover you look and hand out a corresponding coupon. Welcome to the longer term: a boring dystopia the place essentially the most nightmarish expertise is simply one other cutesy promotional instrument.
Burger King introduced the marketing campaign with a video noticed by Marketing Dive. “On the finish of the yr, it’s Friday daily, and the hangover kicks in,” a vaguely robotic voice says as photographs of cheeseburgers glitch out and in over pretend laptop code. “BK presents Hangover Whopper, a expertise that scans your hangover degree and presents a reduction on the perfect combo to assist fight it.” The stunt runs till January 2nd.
Waking up in a post-Christmas haze after one too many glasses of wine, I used to be the right take a look at topic for this Orwellian fast-food gimmick. The reductions solely work on supply orders in Brazil, however the face-scanning occurs within the firm’s cellular app, in addition to a devoted website (the location solely labored on cellular gadgets once I tried it). I gave the web site permission to entry my iPhone digital camera and posed for a photograph. The Burger King software program thought for a second, after which advisable the Double Whopper Jr. That’s solely a one on the hangover scale — inform that to my headache — however I did earn just a little low cost for my privateness sacrifice: a coupon code for R$3.00, or about $0.62 in American {dollars}.
For the final decade, advocates raised alarms over the creeping unfold of facial recognition, a expertise that promises to destroy the few remaining shreds of privateness we’ve left. Simply final week, the FTC banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition for 5 years after an investigation discovered the pharmacy used a lazy implementation of the expertise to falsely accuse 1000’s of individuals of shoplifting, together with one incident involving an 11-year-old woman. However for essentially the most half, the spies gained. At present, facial recognition is everywhere, and as you progress by public areas, you might be constantly beneath the prying watch of cameras working the tech.
Right here’s the factor about facial recognition: it barely works. The expertise does a satisfactory although not 100% correct job with the faces of white males, however quite a few research present it’s far less accurate at figuring out Black, Asian, Latino, and feminine faces. It’s additionally functionally ineffective for different issues like measuring your emotions, detecting political affiliations, or finding you a date, regardless of the handfuls of firms promising digital phrenology. It’s in all probability no good for detecting hangovers both, and should you dig just a little, Burger King appears to confess that.
Burger King didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In keeping with the Portuguese privateness coverage on the Hangover Whopper web site (which begins, “Even with a hangover, I declare…”), Burger King describes the system as a “fictitious evaluation of the extent of your hangover.” In different phrases, it is probably not measuring something. The excellent news is the corporate says it’s not doing something creepy together with your information, both. Burger King guarantees to not share your photographs with any third events and says it gained’t use them for promoting or any functions apart from working the hangover instrument.
Contemplating the face one makes when making an attempt to essentially emphasize a hangover, let’s hope these photographs are correctly disposed of.