Juul’s new Bluetooth enabled e-cigarette tracks your vaping habits and uses facial recognition to verify age
- Juul is now selling an internet-enabled e-cigarette with new safety features
- The device use an app to verify users with facial recognition and age
- It will also collect data on users, including how many pulls one takes
- The measures come amid heightened scrutiny from lawmakers
A new internet-connected e-cigarette from vape company, Juul, will look to curb underage consumption and collect an unprecedented amount user data in the process.
The product, called Juul C1, was recently launched in the United Kingdom and comes with a host of new safety features which are enabled through the use of its companion smart phone app, according the Financial Times.
Among the biggest new features, says the report, is a more stringent age-verification process.
Juul is selling an internet-connected e-cigarette that will track user data and verify age before use
That process involves ‘facial recognition and two-step background check with third-party databases’ according to Dan Thomson, a managing director for Juul in the U.K. who was interviewed by the Times.
The company is also reportedly considering the use of a geofencing feature that would prevent the devices from being used in smoke-free areas like schools and hospitals.
A company spokesperson for Juul told Gizmodo that it doesn’t currently have the capability to do so.
‘No GPS data is shared with JUUL. The GPS location data used for the device locator feature is only contained on a customer’s smartphone,’ the spokesperson told Gizmodo.
While Juul isn’t tracking users’ location quite yet, other more fundamental building blocks, like a GPS locator, have been introduced with C1.
According to the Times, Juul’s C1 can be pinpointed by customers using its new app.
The feature also allows users to lock the device to prevent anyone from using it in the event it goes missing — think, Find My iPhone for your vape.
Perhaps even bigger than the added safety features, however, are new data-oriented changes that turn the C1 into a sensor for vaping habits.
As per the Times, the C1 will monitor user habits like how many pulls one takes and how often they use their device.
Juul has been under an increasingly stringent spotlight for its role in the meteoric rise of teen vaping.
It will also collected personal information like phone numbers, dates of birth, national identification number, and more.
Juul says that this information will be personally unidentifiable and that it will not be made available unless given ‘explicit permission, or in compliance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements’ according to Gizmodo.
Juul’s introduction of the new data and safety features come with particularly apt timing as lawmakers across the world have begun to dissect the company’s role in sky-rocketing rates of teen e-cigarette usage.
Its unclear what effect, if any, the new features will have on vape usage since many ‘dumb’ e-cigarettes lack the same abilities.
For Juul, however, the features may help to appease health officials and scientists who point out that, though likely safer that tobacco, e-cigarettes put people at ‘higher risk’ of cancer and heart disease.