According to the article, it's done for market research, i.e. finding out who buys what, which is a thing businesses like to know. But also apparently it allows the machine to generate "AI-powered product recommendations", which i guess means it tailors reccomendations to each user? Which it can do because it has a touch screen, and the touch screen itself already strikes me as full of shit.

That's what the article says this machine in particular does; but yes, it could totally change the price on you depending on what you look like, and all other kinds of deeply shady things. You can count on a private company to do that kind of thing and then use their favorite argument: it's technically legal.