Burger King Giving Discounts If Facial Recognition Thinks You're Hungover
The Brazilian wing of Burger King announced a surveillance technology marketing stunt this week called the “Hangover Whopper,” celebrating the booze-filled days between Christmas and New Year’s with facial recognition. All you have to do is hold your bleary-eyed visage up to a camera, and the company says its face-scanning software will judge how hungover you look and hand out a corresponding coupon. Welcome to the future: a boring dystopia where the most nightmarish technology is just another cutesy promotional tool.
Burger King announced the campaign with a video spotted by Marketing Dive. “At the end of the year, it’s Friday every day, and the hangover kicks in,” a vaguely robotic voice says as images of cheeseburgers glitch in and out over fake computer code. “BK presents Hangover Whopper, a technology that scans your hangover level and offers a discount on the ideal combo to help combat it.” The stunt runs until January 2nd.
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Here’s the thing about facial recognition: it barely works. The technology does a passable though not 100% accurate job with the faces of white men, but numerous studies show it’s far less accurate at identifying Black, Asian, Latino, and female faces. It’s also functionally useless for other things like measuring your emotions, detecting political affiliations, or finding you a date, despite the dozens of companies promising digital phrenology. It’s probably no good for detecting hangovers either, and if you dig a little, Burger King seems to admit that.
Burger King did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the Portuguese privacy policy on the Hangover Whopper website (which begins, “Even with a hangover, I declare...”), Burger King describes the system as a “fictitious assessment of the level of your hangover.” In other words, it may not be measuring anything. The good news is the company says it’s not doing anything creepy with your data, either. Burger King promises not to share your photos with any third parties and says it won’t use them for advertising or any purposes other than running the hangover tool.
Considering the face one makes when trying to really emphasize a hangover, let’s hope these photos are properly disposed of.
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