Kmart's use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful

Big Brother is not watching you. Instead, thousands of Little Brothers are patiently watching their little corner of the world, recording license plates, logging phone locations, tracking credit card usage. Big Brother doesn’t need to see you, he just asks them to tell him what he wants to know.

Going to see a movie is obviously not unrelated to buying a movie ticket.

For one, I don’t have to buy a ticket. Many theaters participate in programs where you can get a ticket as a reward for other activities (credit card points, eg). The ticket sale is determined by the theater, and is not part of a government supported scheme to prevent some people from ever seeing a movie in any theater, ever.

Finally, the sale of a ticket is necessary for the operation of many movie theaters. It is intrinsic to the business model. The nightclub could operate the service, and even work with ban lists without the centralized biometric database.

Networked, centralised facial recognition is the ultimate "papers, please."

Me. Unless it's clearly stated outside. It's why I wear a covid mask when shopping.

Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.

What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?

The Australian Privacy Act falls well short of European standards, but it does encode some rights for people that businesses must abide by.

Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.

You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.

It generally owns more weapons than your average deluded shop owner.

Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?

Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...

Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.

Well, since you mention it: I have prescription drugs that I am allowed to buy, but I am NOT allowed to abuse them. I must take exactly 1 each day.

Thus I’m regularly allowed to buy drugs I’m not legally allowed to use. “Using a prescription medication that was not prescribed to you is illegal under both federal and state laws.” https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-use-someone-elses-...

But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.

> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.

It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.

And less restricted does not mean no restriction.

For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.

Many of us live in places where everyone, in the very same breath, insists everything should be welcoming to everyone (and usually free) while also insisting that enforcement of norms is unjust. You can’t have it both ways.

(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)

That's already the law in a huge part of the country.

> They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime.

Places like Qt (gas station chain) in AZ have armed guys that are trained to shoot if lawful (armed robbery, etc).

The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.

Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.

If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.

So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.

Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.

I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt

This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.

If you think they just kept those new profits forever -- where did they go? Because grocery is an infamously low-margin business to be in, even now.

There just isn't a huge energy to do something about a lot of petty crimes, therefore nothing is done. Like you, many people have complete apathy for the pursuit of minor shoplifting (I'm making an assumption here that you would be against large scale crime ring level shoplifting).

There isn't the will from the people or the politicians to care about petty crimes like this, until there is. People like you have explicit reasons why you don't care, and many people have the implicit "it just doesn't directly effect me therefore why should I care" reason.

The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.

With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?

Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]

Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.

Everything that is old is new again.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store#Innovations_1...

This is only true in ways that don't matter, because you count "any population" being large enough to obviously include miscreants. Most people do not shoplift, and therefore there are MANY ways to slice a population which will not include shoplifters.

Of course, you cannot know, but statistics is quite clear that shoplifting decrease is way more probable than increase, and you need some other reasons to advocate for increasing shoplifting. So when somebody does that, it’s highly probable that not because shoplifting is actually increasing.

Or, simply google it, check it on reddit, facebook, nextdoor. It is well understood that police in CA do not respond to thefts and do not care about them. It is internalized to point that nobody bothers to call.

Desperation leads to crime, true.

But also true: a lack of societal norms leads to crime. Any time we advocate or demonstrate disrespect, cheating, injustice, cruelty, unwarranted rule-breaking, doxing, or any kind of mob mentality we are contributing to it.

And yes your favorite political villains are all guilty of this, but we need to start with ourselves and the people close to us.

Wages have stagnated for decades as prices have increased. What possible solution is there other than to address the biggest elephant in the room.

Kleptomania

> They must need something awfully badly.

Dopamine

> Perhaps fixing the underlying requirements could help.

Prosecution (not just lip service)

That reported number did not go up, which was bad for the narrative they want to push, so the National Retail Federation, the largest lobbying organization for retail who publishes shrink stats for decades has suddenly stopped publishing that stat.