SceneTap facial recognition software coming to a bar near you.

Last year, San Franciscans were pretty freaked out when they learned that some of their favorite watering holes had installed cameras and were live-streaming footage of them taking one too many shots of Patrón. To add to an already sinister Friday night, local bars have decided to go ahead keep tabs on you via facial recognition technology.

SceneTap, the Austin-based nightlife startup, is officially launching its facial detection software at 25 bars in San Francisco on Friday, including Mr. Smith's and Pete's Tavern. Using a free iPhone or Android App, you can get a snapshot of the San Francisco bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, and crowd size -- all in real time. In short, you can find out if there are enough women to hit on before you bother getting decked out for the night.

So here's how it works, according to SceneTap: Bars place special facial detection cameras inside venues, which pick up on facial characteristics to determine approximate age and gender of the bar crowd. All your personal information remains anonymous, and nothing about you or your face is stored long-term.

Venue owners have their own stake in it. They will have access to this aggregated demographic information, and over time they can use it to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. In other words, did that ladies-drink-free special actually draw more women to the bar?
SceneTap's CEO and founder Cole Harper talked (via e-mail) with SF Weekly about the new technology.

SceneTap: The software is extremely accurate, particularly with our proprietary algorithms in place. Remember, the software doesn't know who you are, so it's going off of what you look like. But since none of the data is individualized, no one person is negatively impacted. The gender information is presented as a percentage breakdown of who has entered the venue, so over the course of the night, the statistics work themselves out. We are partnered with LGBT venues all over the country and this is a sensitive topic we have kept in consideration when providing our service.

We launched in July 2011 at 50 venues in Chicago and have since expanded to Austin (Texas), Bloomington (Ind.), Gainesville (Fla.), Athens (GA) and Madison (Wis.).

SceneTap is already up and running in a half-dozen other cities, and to date, the company's cameras have tracked more than 8.5 million people in bars and restaurants in these cities.

The threat to privacy from an app like SceneTap depends not just on what's being stored but how easily the system could be converted to become more intrusive, whether by a hacker or under a court order.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2012/05/19/20120519PNI0519-wir-san-francisco-app-bars-face-scan.html#ixzz1vXIwKBRw
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2012/05/scenetap_facial_recognition.php

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2012/05/scenetap_ceo_defends_facial_de.php

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2012/05/19/20120519PNI0519-wir-san-francisco-app-bars-face-scan.html