To summarize, it's an experimental project, there is so far only one such screen at the train station. If someone stands within 5 meters of the screen it will try to classify their age and gender and show a targeted ad, and record how long they looked at it. The raw images are not saved.

The screen uses a software called Kairos to analyze faces. It can estimate age, gender, and whether you are "white, black, hispanic, asian, or other".

According to the marketing manager at Peppe's Pizza, he thought there would a label on the screen saying what's going on, but in fact there is just a small sticker on the back of it, which is quite hard to see.

The company making the screen, ProtoTV, says that people should be okay with this because ads on the internet are even more targeted. A government representative says that the system might violate laws about surveillance cameras.

Thank you, this was the first comment actually telling more on the matter after all the "it said I'm X years old!" comments :)

I guess using such a system just to analyze people in real-time might already violate some surveillance laws like you said (in my country all such cameras must be warned about, even traffic cameras). But do you have any idea if those things also record data on customers? I could see how keeping such a database on customers might be dancing on the fine line of creating a "registry", which is pretty heavily regulated by laws at least here. Even more so if there is a possibility to identify real persons from that data.

>The company making the screen, ProtoTV, says that people should be okay with this because ads on the internet are even more targeted.

What a terrible argument considering how universally hated internet ads are.