These are two different things IMO. In what I understand this is an isolated usage of face recognition to replace a manned booth with automation. The underlying

These are two different things IMO. In what I understand this is an isolated usage of face recognition to replace a manned booth with automation. The underlying need for manned booth may be questionable, but it's cultural so let's leave it aside and look at the possibilities of automation, especially when AI is so hot and threatening to eat into our jobs. In this case there were human employees behind the dispenser to notice that toilet paper was issued more that once to same person within a minute or so and he is pocketing it(you may think it's toilet paper, but it's more that a billion population and theft is a theft). Now with facial recognition they can eliminate that job done by a human and make it compeletly automatic. Of course they do use face recognition or other forms of AI to track civilians (as seen from some videos openly put in YouTube) for surveillance but which govt isn't?