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Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.

Yup.

I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation" happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30 minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what you -really- bought.

Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen.

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"Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen."

I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.

After advertising "Just Walk Out"?

Yeah, the author is trying to see what would happen if they roll a can into the bag. This is meant to conceal the act from the computer. The act of concealing merchandise is all that is required in many jurisdictions. If they walked out without the concealing act, then I would think the error should be on the store.

There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.

> Even regular errors can be prosecuted.

Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability, as a self-service cashier.

So convenient!

> They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.

In Common Law jurisdictions, there's no intent required for prosecution of alleged theft, but there absolutely is intent required for conviction! Anything else is a miscarriage of justice.

Except statute and common law can define intent using prima facia definitions. In PA it's considered prima facia evidence as defined in statute that you're hunting if you're walking in the woods with a gun. Doesn't matter your true intent. If you removed an item from a store without paying for it, that's prima facia evidence of shoplifting defined in common law. Again, true intent doesn't matter. The courts will even create president that goes against statute just to make conviction easier - the statute for dog control says it must be "under reasonable control". Instead the courts have ruled that it is a strict liability offense and not subject to the reasonable standard.

So yeah, there's a lot of miscarriage of justice, or at least potential for it. Nobody really cares until it happens to them.

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