Comment by tarotuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tarotuser | Hacker News Reader

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> his is fine, but it's not really about tracking you, it's about tracking the habits of shoppers in aggregate, of which you are a participant. (Yes, having your real address to mail flyers is a bonus but not the end goal.)

Like hell it is. This is an article about Target back in 2012, that identified a pregnant underage girl purely from her purchasing record. 11 years ago.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Target also made their own payment terminals so they could get PII from your cards, and then make a virtual loyalty card from that data. Walmart did similar as well.

> The only viable solution that comes to mind is to shop at places that don't perform this sort of tracking/loyalty card/etc. and continue to pay in cash. The only stores around me that fit this bill are convenience stores and a chain ran by an Amish conglomerate.

With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, cash won't even save you.

What will save us? Strong federal laws similar to the GDPR.

"With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, .."

Meanwhile in Switzerland

https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-expat-news/facial-r...

It’s never a nice feeling to think you are being watched, even if it is in a public place like the centre of a city or train station. Now, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), the main public transport provider in Switzerland, has announced that it will be installing facial recognition cameras in 57 stations across the alpine nation - however, according to the company, the system only wants to know your spending habits and how often you visit each station. SBB to instal cameras to gather more data on passengers

According to 20 Minuten, SBB wants to use the cameras to “obtain high-quality data that can be used to analyse the movement of people at train stations." Unlike the 700 cameras already operating in SBB stations, the new technology will allow the international company to track all passengers individually and in more detail.

SBB said that the cameras will capture and analyse the following data sets:

    Passengers' age, size, amount of luggage and whether they have any special items (e.g. prams, wheelchairs, bicycles)
    Their route through the station
    How long each passenger remains in the station
    Customer behaviour in station shops (purchasing habits, anti-social behaviour, etc)
    Which shops are visited by passengers the most
    How much passengers spend in station shops

That is not necessary any more now.

Now, when there are riots, it is well known that police has human "super-recognizers", which can scan thousands of photos and identify suspect individuals on a whim.

Yet at the same time that one of these persons has this ability and ends up working for the police is a low probability event, the police only tend to use said profiler if the event warrants the expense. When a service moves from human ran to technology ran it generally goes from "I need to do this special thing" to "We should just leave it on and do it all the time, the IT budget takes care of that".

This is far more acceptable than facial recognition systems.

That's just an investment to protect Davos more effeciently against future protests.

This one got a lot of coverage for how accurate it was, but we just ignore when it gets it wrong. For example, I've recently gotten a few mailings about signing up for Medicare once I retire in a few months - except I'm like 30 years away from it.

But the point of it is that it shows they're targeting individuals, not just collecting aggregate numbers. How good they are at the targeting isn't important.

>Walmart did similar as well.

Yep, I get emails about walmart purchases when I rarely go there, because I once made an account to order something online for a discount. I'm not even using the same cards anymore and they still know its me.

> With facial recognition being a nearly solved problem, cash won't even save you.

Would be interesting to see the drop in positive face recognition rate (per human detected) from mask usage.

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