Coffee shops track customers and employees | Hacker News Reader

Coffee shops track customers and employees

imgur.com

35 points_8j5013 comments

Yep... Amazon exposed all this to the public by building it out on an absurd scale and calling it convenience and modern novelty.

SNL saw right through that: https://youtu.be/zS9U3Gc832Y

But it's funny, because this is a more analog sort of tracking than we usually worry about, but utterly logical and makes perfect business sense.

Let's pivot a little bit to self-checkouts. There's been a lot of buzz lately, either buzz or FUD, about self-checkouts being really bugged and people being accused of stealing all the time, and also lots of people figuring out how to rip them off. So this is sort of a cat-and-mouse game of how you refine your surveillance to catch thieves without too many false positives. Fun stuff.

As long as you know it’s happening and the use-case makes sense, I think it’s okay to offer this. The amount of times I get stuck waiting behind someone failing to do basic things with self-checkout is astronomical. Amazon Go and its decedents have always been really nice experiences to me. Much faster and more convenient.

> Video comes from an unknown source.

Are we sure this kind of video is what is actually in use and not some kind of artistic visualisation?

If so, then they've discovered a form of art that companies will pay good money for!

Pretty sure it is: https://twitter.com/i/status/1692614589416915093 , another example/ad for what looks like the specific product. Highly recommen the links in the imgur comment as well. Here is the company: https://www.chooch.com/

It is even worse than you think, if your phone has wifi on, they augment that data with facil recognition and payment data at big box stores like walmart and target. Those cameras are not just for shoplifters.

Not only is the tech there (has been for roughly a decade at least imho) there is a ton of money in it and not just for big box stores but for ad networks/companies (including and especially google) that want to prove the ad they show resulted in a spend of explain why you are a legit target for it. Spaces out and stared at the baby food section? Well that's why ads for baby formula makes sense for you!

This is one of the reasons I firmly believe in a legal fundamental right being passed that enforces the people's right to engage in direct commerce without the use of a third party like a payment processor (bearer token payment as i call it, another term for cash equivalent). Even if you ban face and wifi tracking, gait will be hard and they can always make everyone agree to being tracked before they enter the store like click on a touchpad before they enter and nothing you can do about it if all of them are doing it.

This makes some of the privacy protecting tech/clothing out there seem pretty attractive. 'Ghost glasses' that blind cameras to you, clothing with certain patterns that confuses cameras that are meant to do tracking, etc...

Not sure how well any of it works, although the ghost glasses seem like they would[0].

[0]https://www.reflectacles.com/order/ghost

This is not new. Back in 2004! Robert O'Harrow, Jr. wrote about it in "No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society." In it, he discussed companies like Home Depot tracking the movement of customers with cameras, and sensors in shopping mall choke points to sniff out cell phone traffic. Corporations have been tracking this data, in this manner, for a very long time.

Archived here: https://archive.ph/kcTCy

Is this legal in the EU?

As long as there is a sticker somewhere informing you that the area is surveilled (and as long it is a privately owned space), I don't think there is much to do about it. Though I'm just a bad armchair lawyer.

Depends who and what is tracked. Employees maybe okay.

As long as there is no personal identifiable information stored of customers it is fine. So it is somewhat complicated, but as long as you can not identify customer even by combining with other data I think it is fine.

IANAL but I doubt it.

Video from the livestreamed web camera at the legendary BrainWash cafe/laundromat in San Francisco was collected and put into a public dataset and used for training, then later "This data was removed from access at the request of the depositor."

As facial recognition draws scrutiny nationwide, Stanford research raises questions closer to home:

https://stanforddaily.com/2020/07/28/as-facial-recognition-d...

>The camera didn’t attract much attention.

>It was perched in a corner of San Francisco’s BrainWash cafe and offered an unobstructed sweep of the room. That’s probably why the owners placed it there, and also likely what made it so appealing to the authors of a 2015 Stanford paper on using artificial intelligence (AI) to pick out people in crowded scenes.

>The camera streamed its footage live on the internet, where it was collected by the Stanford researchers to train and validate their algorithm’s effectiveness. Clips from the database, preserved on YouTube, show BrainWash customers milling about, ordering coffee or muffins.

>None of them look like they know they’re going to become the raw material for a computer vision dataset that will be downloaded dozens of times around the globe, appearing in Chinese research linked to human rights abuses and sparking national concern over the power and potential of computer vision and facial recognition software.

>A month after it was mentioned in the Financial Times on privacy concerns over computer vision, Stanford removed the Brainwash dataset from its public online archives “at the request of the depositor.”

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/sx925dc9385

>Brainwash dataset

>Creators/Contributors: Author: Stewart, Russell

>Abstract: Brainwash dataset for face detection. See implementation of algorithms at github.com/russell91/tensorbox.

>Subject: Stanford Department of Computer Science

>Genre: Dataset

>Preferred Citation: Stewart, Russell. (2015). Brainwash dataset. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/sx925dc9385

>Location https://purl.stanford.edu/sx925dc9385

>Access conditions

>Use and reproduction: This data was removed from access at the request of the depositor.

End to end people detection in crowded scenes - results on test set

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeWl0h3kQ24

>Supplementary material for http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04878

The dataset even included some (silent) footage of Tony Sparks Open Mic Comedy Night! I would usually sit by the door to the laundromat where the plug was, to the right and out of sight of the camera, far away from the stage the camera was pointing at, to avoid being taunted by the crazy comedians.

"The Godfather Of Comedy" Discusses The City's Longest-Running Open-Mic:

https://hoodline.com/2015/08/the-godfather-of-comedy-discuss...

>“We’ve had some things that are really funny or weird, like a guy who climbed into a box and did his act from there,” Sparks remarked. “[Another] guy wore a green suit, all green, face covered up and everything. We had a guy who did it naked. We had a girl who pulled her top off. Sometimes some of these people just need someone to look at them and talk to them, you know?”

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