Partygoers boycott bars using SceneTap app that scans faces

It's the app that promises to tell you whether the next bar's full of kittens or cougars - or too many blokes - just by scanning faces at the door.

Image: Controversial app SceneTap scans faces of bar patrons. Picture: Courtesy of SceneTap

And while real-time updates on crowd size, age and gender could be useful for some, critics in at least one US city are threatening to boycott any venue that uses it.

The head of developer SceneTap, Cole Harper, has responded by writing an open letter to “San Francisco” as the technology rolls out in 25 local bars.

“Dear San Francisco,” Mr Harper, 28, posted after critics branded the app an invasion of privacy and a “creepy” tool for “men to hunt down women”.

“We’ve taken a lot of heat in the past few days and I can completely understand the concern.

“I realise there are aspects of our technology that could appear to be controversial and raise serious red flags for people, and I assure you I’m not taking it lightly.”

Mr Harper said the company had ruled out “facial recognition” technology, which could identify a patron, in favour of “facial detection”, which could generate data but did not store identifying images.

The app works by relaying pictures of patrons taken at the door that are mapped onto a grid. An algorithm then matches the facial dimensions to a database of averages for age and gender to make a match.

It also lets venues decide on business rules to “cap out” what statistics would show, with the percentage of males never exceeding 72 per cent and females 58 per cent – in case of a swarm of males showed up as a “correction”.

Despite the outcry over privacy, Mr Harper said the tool was supposed to be a “lighthearted app for consumers and one that would help venue owners with their marketing efforts”.

"Nothing that we do is collecting personal information,” he said. “It's not recorded, it's not streamed, it's not individualised.”

SceneTap is already in use in six other cities across the US, including Chicago and several college towns.

A lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which focuses on surveillance technology and privacy, said the threat to privacy from an app like SceneTap depended not just on what was being stored but how easily the system could be converted to become more intrusive, whether by a hacker or under a court order.

“Even if everything is happening the way it is supposed to, then the next question is, gee, is that good enough?'' lawyer Lee Tien said. "Is that something that you're comfortable with?"

Mr Tien said facial recognition technology had advanced to the point that having your picture taken potentially offered up the same degree of identifying information as giving someone your fingerprints.

"Ten years ago if I walked down the street and took a picture of someone I didn't know, there was little I could do to find out who that person was. Today it's a very different story," he said.

By staff writers news.com.au

What do you think of this technology? Creative, inventive or just plain creepy?

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