Rite Aid deployed facial recognition systems in hundreds of U.S. stores
reuters.com
reuters.com
It's not just facial recognition in stores: it's tying face, license plate, credit card, and phone app into a single customer view; it's pricing based on your past (and current!) behavior; and it's data consortiums to tie together data across companies (ever wonder why everyone asks for your phone #? It's traditionally the primary key in the big-*ss joins).
The expectation of privacy we have online is coming to the real world, make no mistake. I wish I had a call to action here but... keep yelling, I guess? I don't have a solution.
How will that work in a brick-and-mortar store where there is a price label on everything?
This isn't necessary. There could be a public price and a private price.
> there is an option for forgotten card which lets you bypass the need for an account
Neither is this.
The medium to deliver this customer experience are out there right now, but they're all working on adding signals to inform which offers you get.
Seems like a win for them. Now they can tell their investors that their loyalty program is super popular and constantly growing!
Of course if they scan the face and correlate that way - meh. For that reason I only use cash at Target - but not sure how long that will be enough to keep from data points being put together there or anywhere at this rate.
More likely, though, it would be pricing things differently at stores based on demographics. Regional grocery store chains do this - We have Stop & Shop here in New England, and if I go to a store closer to an urban area, the prices are lower on some items and higher on other items.
I am in Wales, we don't have such things here. I think I'd be reluctant to shop anywhere that did this. What would be the point of working hard to earn more money if all the prices went up around you so you were no better off than before?
I imagine it would be similar to that.
A famous example is Tesco in the UK that worked out they could double the prices of certain cheeses with no impact on sales volume, because the people that bought those cheeses mostly bought the most expensive brands in other categories (they were probably higher income people).
It contains about a dozen coupons for the exact items I typically buy:
- Store-brand milk, 2%
- Honey bunches of oats with almonds cereal
- Bone-in chicken breasts, family pack
- Noosa strawberry-rhubarb yogurt
- Old spice aluminum-free deodorant, if it's been a few weeks since my last purchase
etc. etc. etc. It's not the generic "all Pepsi/Nestle products on sale" mailers. It's the exact stuff I've bought in the past. And yes, I admit I'm a creature of habit. There's little $4/hour coupon clipping or recipe selection required (I hate that), I can pretty much shop my normal list and then swipe the coupons across the scanner. And tell you what, if I skip a week at Meijer and go to Trader Joe's instead, there's likely a few more coupons for a little deeper discount the next week.
It's more than a little creepy. I have no idea how they got my home address, maybe scanned from my driver's license when I bought alcohol? And I don't use a store membership, they must be just tying my debit card number to my shopping habits.
I have a walmart.com account - they add my in-store purchases to my Walmart.com history when I pay with a credit card I used at walmart.com.
I mean, I carry my phone around in my pocket, so I kinda expect at least big Google is watching me. And probably the cell network. And probably the government, passively.
But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy? I mean: the customer is typically just buying whatever their doctor prescribes them. I guess they have aisles of cosmetics and cold medicine and stuff, but still, this seems remarkable for its banality and at the same time invasiveness. It's the worst kind of evil: stupid evil.
I never sign up for loyalty programs (phone number), but I still pay with a debt card (I'm not sure if store can track people without violating card ISO agreements, but I suspect they can with hashed numbers), so I'm not full RMS/cash only.
As far as shrink prevention .. eh. I don't have a big issue with that. I've watch a woman just walk out with shit in an inner city store. Dude in line was like "She just walked out with two wine bottles," and the cashier was like, "She does that all the time. If the guard is here, he'll stop her. I'm not paid enough."
The article makes a big deal about certain neighborhoods. I'm pretty sure they just selected the stores with the highest reported shoplifting losses. Trying to read more into it is giving the data more intrinsic intelligence or prejudice than it has.
I don't know about Rite Aid, but Walgreen's is pretty much the 'corner store' in many neighborhoods.
It all revolves around profit maximization. Late stage capitalism will be the downfall of many countries.
This sounds like a line that some good writer trying to make fun of silicon valley would come up with. If that's the case, good job!
Your digital facial likeness will almost certainly be collected, collated with other data points, then both data mined and resold to data brokers. One of them will no doubt be dumb enough to leave their DB open to the wide internet and your data will be leaked and you will have no recourse because you can't prove damages in the US legal system and you aren't the customer of the data broker.
It is registered in almost all systems already and you'll get the discounts. They get nothing (except the knowledge that apparently Jenny buys everything). Plus, nowadays most people working at checkout don't even know the significance of that number and don't bat an eye when you give it
But then, some won't notice if you say your number is 314 1592...
that's only a problem if the minimum wage worker behind the counter cares, which I doubt.
Plus those cards often have points or other rewards, e.g. spend 2400 points and get these cucumbers for $1 off, so it's a win for them too.
The cashier doesn't. Their incentive is to keep the checkout line moving. Sometimes they will even offer you a card at the register to get you a discount (not sure why).
The manager's incentive is to keep customers content and returning.
BTW, what is the significance of that specific phone number?
Because they are told to do so, to get as many customers as possible use the card. My wife automatically answers "no, we haven't got any and are not interested, thanks".
> BTW, what is the significance of that specific phone number?
It's Pi :)
Cashier card is something I don't understand either. Maybe some database somewhere with NOT NULL, so that problem was solved by issuing cashier cards?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WTdTwcmxyo
On a side note, the phone system has a reserved number range (555-XXXX) for fictitious numbers for TV/movies/etc. to use. This song didn't use that but instead used a real number. When the song came out in 1981, people who had this number got so many phone calls they had to change their number. I'm not sure, but phone companies may have retired the number because it has become impractical to use.
All of the analytics of the internet, all of this data collection and machine learning - all to show my a picture of a $69 leather jacket. Or a Muse headband. Or a Peloton bike.
I’m not a consumer, these tricks don’t work on me.
So you're typing this comment from your yurt using a borrowed computer or something?
Buying one of these things does not enter you into the consumer-product-churn-rat-race.
The only things we can do is use fake/different numbers at stores, use prepaid or business debit cards and have burner iPhones and rooted Androids. Register your license plate in corporations names, and don't put your utilities in your real name. If we just decorrelate the data, and falsify it, then we could have a chance.
- Drive around city
- Feed video into OpenALPR: https://www.openalpr.com/
- ???
- Surveil
I try to remind people I see that are okay with this tech being deployed at the airport and other places - that the state spending a bunch of money 'to keep an eye out for stolen cars' is just an excuse to grab data that can later be looked at - and is sometimes given to repo men so they can take cars from people who are late on payments.
When you go to the registers there will be beacons there and it can correlate it all to the identity of the purchaser.
If you have wifi on and I believe if you have connected to a private ssid, your phone will broadcast requests for it. You can passively listen to phones and look these up in online ssid to location databases.
You can turn off bluetooth and wifi (although apple has dark patterns wrt to this and android? maybe you can turn them off?)
I'm uncertain about NFC.
And to the original point of reducing tracking, for Safeway/etc rewards numbers just use random local phone numbers and pay cash if that’s your priority. Better than paying more than double price for limited selection.
In a lot of cases there is an in between. I live near an independent full service grocery store (they have 2 locations) which isn't the cheapest in town and isn't the most expensive. They have a good selection. If they are 10% more expensive, I'm happy to support them.
What, specifically is being said here? Higher prices don't somehow make transactions "more convenient."
They've always been more expensive than grocery stores, doesn't matter if they are local independents or big chains.
As @ska pointed out, I'm not really talking about buying all of your groceries at the corner store at a 3x markup. In every city I've ever lived in, I've had the option of taking my business to an independently owned (grocery|hardware|pharmacy|etc.) store where the "10% shop local tax" more or less applied. To me this seems like a fair exchange for the peace of mind I get from knowing that I'm not being targeted by government-grade surveillance tech when I walk through the door, and that the employees I interact with are being paid a living wage. YMMV depending where you live but I hardly believe this is a phenomenon isolated only to the places where I've lived.
Also, if your local shop doesn't carry an item you want, you can always speak with management and ask for them to stock it :)
And if you weren’t a shop lift, it sounds like taking public transit, walking, or biking, and paying with cash will be king for the privacy conscious. At least this will force a few people into better mobility habits.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the anti-mask campaigns were started by parties that have vested interests in facial tracking (I don't have any evidence to support this assumption).
No, facial recognition is based on the distance of points on your face (nose, center of eyes, eyebrows, etc). A mask only covers the lower half of your face. It may make facial recognition slightly less accurate but it still works. Casinos have been using facial recognition for some time to detect individuals who have been banned. These banned individuals have gone as far as hiring professional make-up artists to change their appearances but facial recognition still works due to the fact that certain points on the face (e.g. distance between eyes) cannot be altered. The accuracy is reduced but there's still a large enough confidence interval to cause an intervention by casino security.
The better the algorithm the harder it is to spoof. But some of the older/crappier ones can be defeated just by tilting your head to the side.
This is my understanding and when I was playing around with some algorithms it was a grading metric for the algorithms.
I think we could also simply pass laws against digital surveillance instead of forcing everyone to dress like a mix of Inspector Gadget and a sex offender
Only if you're wearing sunglasses and a hat. Even then there are ways to get at people, such as gait analysis, or your cellphone tattling on you via bluetooth or wifi.
Edit: I may have misunderstood the tone of your comment. Are you implying it's bad that people at your local store might know who you are? I should have my coffee.
I can see why it sounded that way.
Most people I know genuinely want to support local business, but simply can't because local businesses do not provide them any additional value for the often higher price.
The essence of the problems with both the online surveillance state we've created and the burgeoning meatspace one we're sprinting towards is that people (in America, at least) have effectively ignored the knock-on effects of their purchases for the last, I don't know, 50 years or so. The cost of a functioning downtown is a couple bucks more, the cost of a local economy that's worth a damn is a couple bucks more, the cost of knowing where your products came from and that there's not a dead body or slave labor in their past is a couple bucks more.
I'm not gonna judge someone who says "I can't afford a couple bucks more," but if you're on this site and working in this industry and you're mad that Rite Aid is stalking you, pay a couple bucks more.
If part of the value proposition includes not being stalked, that becomes more compelling. However, it's often the small guys that explicitly try to build their phone number database. The confusion when I ask if I can just "skip it" tell the story. Either way I truly hope the situation improves.
One solution could be to legislate uniform pricing. Would at least take away the incentive in many cases.
Price targeting can be (and often is) a useful and mutually beneficial practice. Obviously it can be taken too far as we're seeing here. I think enforcing privacy rights of consumers would be a better legislative goal than uniform pricing.
The price of a loaf of bread will probably just rise, for each individual, until everyone is reduced to different shades of poor, no matter how much they earn.
It seems that a lot of companies are these days are trying to hack their customers instead of treating them right. In the long run I don't this will work. I already am getting a very bad taste dealing with a lot of companies because they seem to view me, the customer, as something to extract money from instead of a customer to be respected. You notice that for example with a lot of search results where the company places stuff they want to sell in the results instead of allowing me to search for what I need.
Either we are going into a very dark future or there will be massive pushback. Not sure which way it will go.
The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value.
The largest companies in the world exist to make money and their investments exist to further that goal.
>Your data has value.
Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates and Whole Foods already knows it's customers barely look at the prices? Backing that up with data is nice but how much value does it really have?
FOMO is a big thing at the corporate management level. A million here, a million there to run pilot programs and do partial roll-outs seems like cheap insurance against getting blindsided by something you wrote off as a fad.
If this is how you think pricing decisions are made, I don't know what to say.
On the one hand, we have the lived experience of increasing surveillance and targeting, an investigative article discussing it, and long, documented history of data investments from large corporations.
On the other hand, we have speculation that it's all FOMO.
You don't run pilot programs and eight-year roll-outs of things you aren't taking seriously.
Also due to any lack of slack in their product line, I don't have anything I'm missing out on.
So basically, sell me latex gloves for <$7 or I'm not coming in. Magnetic screw trays for $.99 or the bigger ones for $1.99 or not coming in. I can wait literal years for that motorcycle lift to drop to $250 instead of $475.
there's nothing wrong with that--i do it with my local grocery/big box stores too.
"All the smart guys are spending money on it, it must be valuable!"
You could use this logic to invest in real estate in 2007. Or you would've been eager to invest in WeWork had their IPO not been fucked. You would also believe self-driving cars are a good idea, but I'd bet my life savings against it knowing what I know.
Don't assume you're playing the same game as them when you can't actually provide any data that what they do works. Where is the actual "X dollars of surveillance turns into Y dollars return" data points? You're just providing speculation no better than the person you're arguing with, and honestly your argument is less compelling.
Knowing I'll burn up a bunch of time waiting for one of those lockdowns to be opened I usually order online and pickup in store those items I know are locked up.
> Does it. Harbor Freight already knows it's customers are cheapskates
Actually, that's a great example of a company that strategically prices items differently for different customers. Some of their customers are cheapskates and hit up hfqpdb.com and do the math to find the best coupon for every item they buy. Some just use the coupons in the flyer they get in the mail. Some of their customers pay the shelf price. The price essentially adjust to how cheap that particular customer is based on how much time they're willing to spend looking for coupons. Customers who don't care pay an inflated price.
I would bet a large portion of their profit comes from the people in the middle -- who were lured into the store with a coupon and end up buying a bunch of other stuff at inflated prices. I could totally see them being very interested at identifying who those customers are and how to lure them into the store.
"They wouldn't do it if it didn't work" should be added to lists of logical fallacies. People do dumb stuff and make mistakes all the time, but groups of people are collectively about as clever as a slime mold.
To assume unquestioningly the intelligence of our rulers during the Trump era is just, wow. I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, the worst people on the planet are the ones at the wheel.
Who did this? I laid out the case that modern large corporations (no need to bring politics into it) are some of the most effective moneymaking machines in history. We can observe them investing heavily into customer surveillance/tracking. We can also observe the primary players in this industry thriving from a revenue and market cap perspective (Google, Facebook, Amazon).
The hypothesis is that both main street (through revenues) and wall street (through outrageous P/E ratios) are signaling that the data being collected does, in fact, have value.
I was once misinformed with the belief that business' primary goal is to make money. But when you have the experience of explaining data to a CEO that clearly shows that their customer surveillance has a negative ROI and that the conclusions they are drawing from the data are not warranted. (For example, if you want to claim that your initiative increased sales, you need to compare an equivalent data point before and after the initiative, not just afterward.) If you say this and then look into the cold, dead eyes of a sociopath you'll know how foolish you were to ever assume the point of tracking customer data is to make money.
I felt dumb ever believing that business leaders care directly about money. I knew that to be false in high school when they made me read 1984. The lesson that O'Brien teaches Winston is one that we clearly have not learned.
> The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
We can add to that list "The object of unrelenting invasive surveillance is unrelenting invasive surveillance."
yes, and/or that unrelenting invasive surveillance is an enabler and an aspect of persecution, torture, and power.
Thanks for sharing your CEO experience, that is not a data point I have encountered. I do think money and power are closely linked, although maybe not as closely as I assumed.
==I felt dumb ever believing that business leaders care directly about money.==
Today, what do you believe they care directly about? Power? Ego?
and groups of people can be smart crowds or dumb (slime) mobs, depending on the systemic conditions.
Exactly. Other reasons for doing something include:
- Thinking that it works, when it doesn't - in particular, reality is messy, and you can often get away believing in bullshit, as long as your peers believe in the same bullshit too.
- It not working for the company in general, but working for them individually to scam their own employer or boost their careers (related: CV-driven development in software).
- It not working, but the profit is made off making you believe they do it because it works.
That's a dangerous assumption to make, even irresponsible post-2008.
It's also a fallacy which gets used by scammers often.
For example, some in the spam industry relied on that fallacy to sell malvertising schemes to rubes. Because somebody must be making money off spam, right? But the scam is selling the scheme/software to enough spammers to extract a nice living before each of them predictably jumps ship. So the answer could be, "no, they aren't making money," or, "maybe, but you won't be," and the incentive to sell the systems is still there.
Data may have value, but continued investment in it is certainly not enough on its own to elucidate what that value is.
this is a huge money stream, and for retail they don't have many other options-- amazon and online delivery is eating their lunch.
This is true, and frankly really well put. But I think it has its limits. Rite Aid and similar stores have an extremely tenuous "relationship" with their customers already. The pharmacy in the back might, but the overwhelming bulk of their revenue comes from the snacks and sundries they sell to people walking by, and frankly those people don't care any more about the store than it does about them.
I mean, it's cynical, but there's social value in having Just Another Faceless Junk Store on every corner. We don't want to be "treated right" as an independent variable, we want the drink cooler and sunscreen to be trivially available and we'll walk into whatever door we see.
In that world, "hacking your customers" is the only feasible path to growth. I share the upthread concern as to whether this is effective, I just don't see a way for these stores to avoid going down that path if it does work.
Maybe this is a reason to reorient our economy to focus on the well-being of its citizens as opposed to efficiency improvements in their monetization. If growth in sales/revenue/whatever wasn’t the goal, then the economy could focus on providing necessary services instead of “hacking” customers in order to sell more junk. The economy would be focused around giving people what they need as opposed to maximizing consumption.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mac-users-pay-more-than-pc-users-s...
“ Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn't showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.”
There are some small ml cases that seem to work ok, like suggestions for message responses.
But YouTube video suggestions for example seem so facile. If I click a few videos about today's news, then every video suggestion quickly becomes similar content. Even though I am subscribed to a dozen niche channels and may have watched a bunch of science and engineering videos, I don't get any suggestions related to that unless I directly seek them out. After which, all my suggestions turn to engineering videos.
there's some kind of mob rule going on suggestion wise that's pretty annoying. What are some gem sci/engr channels you've discovered if you don't mind sharing.
After a while I finally realized what happened: I would keep an ISS live-feed running in the background while I did housework. It was nice to just see where it was. Turns out that video was being hosted by a channel connected to several of these other Thai channels, and youtube assumed I would enjoy the content.
They still come up occasionally, but I've clicked "Not Interested" enough times that I think they got the idea.
This is used for a couple things. One, if customer pulls product A off the shelf instead of product B right next to it, the manufacturer of product B can purchase the ability to have their coupon print out at checkout to be handed to somebody who is proven to have an interest in the category. Alternately, it can be used with self-checkout systems to confirm that the shopper actually scanned product A, or to alert security to check the shopper's receipt and cart at exit.
Amazon is offering this sort of technology for checkout-less stores, but similar offerings for loss-prevention and targeted marketing are online and available.
It would be trivial to add face recognition to this stack, and I strongly suspect it is in fact offered if you ask for it. The use case there would be focused around the loss prevention aspect, and that's a huge financial driver for implementing these systems.
Another interesting feature of this market is that the websites for the products themselves don't really advertise the full functionality of the product. You won't see the scale of the offering until you get to the in-person sales demo and slide decks. It feels like the vendors know how the technology could be perceived.
What does that add over simply printing a Product B coupon whenever someone purchases Product A?
Charitable explanation: maybe it covers additional use cases such as you stopping to look at a product, but end up not buying it.
In college I needed some cash and went to a “study”. For $75 bucks you went to a mocked up grocery store and spent 45 minutes strapped up in a chair where they showed you combination after combination of (one vendors) bottle colors and arrangement on the shelf and tracked your eyes on how quickly you gravitated towards them. Always seemed super intense what retailers do.
It certainly won't stop them from selling on that feature.
You are right about the lengths product marketing companies will go to. There is a lot of money on the table and the grocery business is all-in on this stuff.
> It would be trivial to add face recognition to this stack, and I strongly suspect it is in fact offered if you ask for it.
It just-so-happens to also have value to those charged with loss prevention. If a shoplifter is caught, they can be informed that they are no longer welcome to shop in this store. Enforcing that can be difficult unless....
Perhaps also consider that there are different ethical questions around stealing luxuries than around necessities: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-ethical-fourier-transf...
Oh please, spare us this nonsense. If they are so broke, they can get on food stamps. Allowing theft is not the answer.
Take the "Orwellian surveillance" part. We get about 2 paragraphs about how surveillance in the US is largely unregulated and whatnot and then 4 of them about China. The other sections afterwards seem like they were written to almost justify the use of surveillance in US corporations.
Maybe it's all in my head but it's just something I keep noticing whenever there's writing about surveillance in the US.
Paragraph works just as well after s/China/America/g.
The real danger to me is the US govt based on their track record, and it's acceleration of surveillance and force over the last 4 years
The conventional wisdom is that they need an angle to make readers care. My hot take is that they're too fucking thick to even begin making an intelligent analysis of anything but the most black-and-white topics. If something is actually contentious they just report on a handful of fashionable opinions as co-equal, trashtalk the low-status opinions, and don't even bother acknowledging the principals and/or perceived realities that lead people to various opinions.
It only becomes a problem if I (1) have a doppleganger, that (2) likes to steal, and (3) lives in the same area as me. It'd still be a kafkaesque nightmare but probably a pretty rare one.
"We track customer movement, behavior and tie that to an individual customer record. We keep this information in perpetuity to serve you better."
Gotta have that "serve you better" on there.
Even after you go through the rigamarole of proving your innocence, you still have to live with having been roughed up by the police, having your mug shoot plastered all over the internet, and having experienced county jail first hand.
And that assumes that you're not charged with something else that happened during the course of the arrest.
The problem is that these systems are deployed in communities such that they implicitly target black people, yet plenty of research shows that they aren't even remotely effective at identifying black people, at all. And the criminal justice system doesn't care.
And that is what makes it scariest of all.
But it isn’t racist in the way that you expect it to be. It isn’t racist at the level of the intersection of the system and the “street”.
The problem that you think is the problem, isn’t. The real problem is much more insidious. And if you attempt to solve the problem that you think is the problem you will do nothing but worsen the problem, just as all previous interventions.
It is what it is.
https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
E.g. a person could go to a store and either Find or Not Find a camera. For stores where they Find a camera, they can choose to form an opinion about cameras and whatever 'races' shop here, and leave.
E.g. a person could go to a store and see they are on camera. They can make an association about anti-theft cameras if the store is dominantly in a neighborhood of a specific 'race'. Then they go to another neighborhood dominated by a different 'race', from the same Store Chain, and see they are not on camera. They can speculate this neighborhood is trusted more by the store to be lower in theft.
E.g. two people could then be shopping in one store which has no cameras. One person belonging to a 'race' where cameras are typically found is seen by another. The other assumes, based upon prior observation, that this person of that 'race' is associated with theft. They are suspicious of that first person. ==> Bias against a person of a different race.
(1) Only used within private property. No cameras pointing out into the streets.
(2) Used for security purposes only, not marketing or tracking the customers and selling a profile of them to other organizations.
(3) Adequate IT practices so that access is restricted to only employees who need it and so it isn't hacked into and used for whatever nefarious purposes.
(4) Deployed based on objective criteria based on real data, like loss (theft) rates of stores. Not some regional manager looking at a map and deciding that these stores get it and these others don't based on their subjective idea of what qualifies as a good neighborhood and a bad neighborhood.
(5) Technology can be shown not to treat one group of people worse than another. You don't want scenarios like a system that, when dealing with people of one race, is bad at differentiating individuals, so that a legit ban on a person of that race results in a higher false positive rate for others of that race.
For #2 and #3, it would probably help to just not record (or have very limited retention) of the data.
For #4 and #5, some of this might already be legally required already in the US because of existing civil rights laws that prohibit denying customers access based on race, etc.
I don't support either major retailer, I'm just providing context that within the given sales (and margin), it's barely a drop in the bucket to a problem for Walmart.
It's 0.57% of sales [1]. I tried to find out how much in returns they deal with but...I suspect that returns is a higher number or at minimum comparable.
[1] - https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/walmart-tur...
Sure they have the right to this, and you can choose whether or not to shop with them if they do, but would you want them to without your consent?
I am not a fan.
The other one targeting my face? Not so much (tho I'm less bothered, since wearing a mask).
If someone shoplifts then they get banned from the chain, or a network of chains. This would be an alternative to police involvement. Restitution could be done proportionality and privately.
Of course there will be issues with it but I’m sure it could be cheaper to figure this out than the alternative loss prevention solutions.
These systems will likely be networked together, building and sharing profiles on known undesirables such that they can be banned from most, if not all stores eventually. Once that happens, there will be a class of people who cannot legally buy food anymore, because to enter a store would be trespass.
Now that I think about it, we already have temporary suspensions from Walmart and the like if you get caught. How is this different than a guard just watching the CCTV all day?
My friends paid, I paid cash, I skipped checkin and went right to the room.
What flipped was my friend walked up to a blackjack table and the dealer greeted him by name. Another friend who had also checked in was greeted by the cash out teller by name. They didn't seem to know who I was.
I started paying for everything in cash and was like "welp, guess I'm definitely never coming back to vegas"
And today along with countless millions of North Americans I dialed my mom on a piece of technology that was made in China and its authoritarian Government (TM). FFS can't they stop shoving big bad China into every story. However bad it is not China's fault for US corporation being A-hole.
Added for clarification: This is not to protect China, rather to point out this style of "reporting" that lately seems to have very little to do with the true reporting as it used to be.
Facial Recognition is coming along with all other sorts of identification. They key to making sure these are not abuse is to get embedded into the process of making them. This way issues of privacy, accuracy, and accountability, can all be addressed.
Currently far too many here, especially here, are the head in sand type. If they shout it down and declare it evil and see a big name step down they declare it fixed. Ignoring the fact the world is a big place and other companies and countries really don't care what your opinion is. So get in there and make sure where you live that this technology when it does become common place has the structures in place to protect the individual.
Because you can damn well guarantee it won't be corporations abusing it, it will be politically oriented groups who will exploit it. You think the cancel culture is bad now with their name and shame combined with using sycophants to leak records if not outright court challenges to sealed records, wait till they abuse this
I am very worried that there will be a lot going on behind the scenes. Public cancel culture is bad but secret cancel culture is even worse.
So because it's going to happen anyways, get on board or else?
I'm not a follower of defeatist thinking. Large structural changes can happen, but only through persistence and focus.
Saying "it's not worth it" right from the get-go is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
-- Hannah Arendt
I suspect the companies you are mentioning didn't pull out for ethical reasons but because they have other products and don't need that market.
Of course, it's entirely possible that in the end, controlling these practices will require legislation (either to prohibit, or regulate, or at least disclose where this is being done.) If that legislative fight happens, it will be very helpful to not have the most largest and most politically-connected tech firms depending on this stuff as a key revenue stream.
"Last week, however, after Reuters sent its findings to the retailer, Rite Aid said it had quit using its facial recognition software."
Though likely because of the higher use in low income neighborhoods than facial recognition overall.
We absolutely need legislation to permanently stop this. The free market is not going to magically pop up a competing brick and mortar that doesn't spy on us and/or sell/give our data to other corporations/governments.
It would be much more ethical to personally stop going to the store and giving them business if you object (which is a valid opinion, imo). Encouraging others to do the same, spreading news about the practice, etc, all seems good. But once you start calling for people with guns to coerce the property owners you're doing something unethical.
Overcoming masks is a feasible challenge and will be solved with, I assume, modest efforts.
Side note: I tried my Android phone face recognition while using a mask. Interestingly, as long as the nose structure can be perceived, it managed to recognize me.
It's incognito from your stupid brain patterns that want to find something to worry about incessantly. It's not that the stupid thoughts stop - you just pet them like stupid little things that they are and move on with your life.
Personally I've taken to wearing masks and large sunglasses, just because I can. I suppose they could still track my gait, posture, hair style, etc.
> “This decision was in part based on a larger industry conversation,” the company told Reuters in a statement, adding that “other large technology companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technology’s utility.”
Will it come back when the masks go away, or have they realized that it was never useful in the first place?
(They also claim it had nothing to do with race, which is kind of farcical since it's well known these recognition systems have trouble with race. It obviously has something to do with race, even if they're choosing to ignore that issue.)
In brief, my questions are these: Can these systems track the movements of people wearing masks? (I suspect they can, perhaps with some tweaking.) And assuming that these systems can provide accurate movement data through the store, does analysis of that movement data actually provide actionable suggestions of how to arrange the store that, when put to the test, actually increase sales? (I suspect the efficacy of this analysis is greatly overstated by those selling it, and stores are beginning to realize this.)
More serious (even though I think my example isn't that far-fetched): I'm really not sure what to think of these camera and whetavere software backend slowly creeping into society. It has been predicted, definitely not everyone is ok with it, but still it just happens.
Keep in mind, just like with web analytics, these solutions will be provided by 3rd parties which will aggregate this data across multiple businesses.
My gait changes if I use hiking boots vs. bouncy runners for example.
The quick solution for retailers would be banning use of IR/lasers in-store and they'll play the "if you don't like it you can shop elsewhere" game.
'Was' is the key word. The vast bulk of pill mills were shuttered a decade ago.
The current prescription drug problem is the steadily increasing difficulty for people in pain to get prescription pain relief.
On other words, Rite-Aid employees can already recognize your face. Deal with it.
Why is my principle so important? Because the alternative conflicts with the computational enhancement of the mind, which is far more important than any illusory gains to had from banning this tech or that tech.
Are those same employees networked together and can remember the exact day and time you where in any of the stores and know exactly what you purchased? They have also memorised the entire FBI most wanted list and any other list of faces that may be in a "bad credit" database?
However, Rite-Aid employees cannot recognize every customer's face. Scale is the difference here, and scale is what people object to.
Refusing to see that as a problem or at least a responsibility to consider is why people are starting to hate our industry :thumbsup:
This mindset would have open sourced the Manhattan Project if it was written in Python and used interesting storage advances, but it was safe because it was FOSS.
So you'd be fine with mega-corps or the government tracking everyone's movements with drones, and cataloging it into a massive database? After all, you can already do that with a bunch of minimum-wage workers and a map.
>Why is my principle so important? Because the alternative conflicts with the computational enhancement of the mind, which is far more important than any illusory gains to had from banning this tech or that tech.
So basically you want technological singularity, even if it means turning the world into a cyberpunk dystopia?
Yes. That singularity is coming anyway and it might as well be on our terms.
So by your own logic alone this technology should be dismantled.
You defer to a fantasy utilitarian argument, where the material interests of the average human right now should be subjugated to possible technological advancement. This makes your moral and ethical compass devoid of any humanity. This is truly a horrifying set of morals you have put forth.
Benefits can be imaginary and those don't weigh heavily against the harm being done. Bulk surveillance of people who aren't suspected of a crime, is one example.
Sometimes benefits only outweigh harm because the harm is limited - due to push-back (or the threat thereof) from the public.
You mean the two front store barely-above-minimum wager workers in a 15,000 sq.ft store given 10 tasks to complete in the time available for 6 while still maintaining performance metrics to avoid demerits and who are specifically instructed not to accuse anyone of shoplifting even if they directly observe it happening?