As you can see they're denying that this is used for customer identification, but who knows. It seems extremely suspicious to me that they'd go so far as to implement AI to identify individual faces, but then do nothing with it.

What I do know is that there is a company called X5 in Russia which has similar self checkout cameras and they do use this for identification. And recently ASDA and other Supermarkets have partnered with Yoti (a UK digital identity company) to use their checkout cameras for age verification, https://www.yoti.com/blog/yoti-digital-age-verification-tria...

Imo it's clear where this is heading regardless of what it's being used for exactly today. And it's possible they might already be using these cameras to identify previous problematic customers, but I might just be paranoid. I don't think anyone really knows what individual supermarkets are doing with them today and no one really seems to care either.

I'm skeptical of the claim that they're engaging in facial recognition. I guess, at some point, it's possible, but right now, given the widespread use of the cameras across every supermarket, it seems very difficult to imagine that all of these supermarkets have implemented a facial recognition system at the same time. Rather, they've all realised, if you put a camera at a self checkout, it'll probably reduce theft. That's why the screen is there, because you can see yourself being recorded, if it was for facial recognition... why a screen at all?

Typically a self-checkout will have a camera if it does not use a scale, whereas cameras are less common at the self-checkouts that use a scale -- and so it's harder to steal. That's my experience anyway across a few different supermarkets in the UK.