Reverse-engineering infrared-based electronic shelf labels | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-engineering infrared-based electronic shelf labels

furrtek.org

43 pointspabs38 comments

These systems only exist to take as much money from individual shoppers as possible. They're throwing all kinds of lies at the wall to see which ones consumers will fall for.

> ESLs are ecological: they can be updated and they last for years, it saves paper and ink! This is utter bullshit. Prices and products don't change that often

Prices didn't used to change that often, but now they can be changed several times a day (or even several times a minute) using automated systems. Cell phone tracking and cameras can allow a store to get information about you and your income and they can use that data to charge you higher prices for everything, or to strategically increase the prices of the items you buy most often while monitoring and tracking changes to your buying habits in order to take as much money from you as possible. That's the entire point. It's not about ecological savings, it's about economical gains.

> ESLs provide better price accuracy, what you see is what you'll pay

Facial recognition at the shelf and at the register can keep prices consistent for you as an individual even while those prices change wildly over short amounts of time. I doubt they'll let you modify the price displayed at the shelf and still give you that same price when you check out though. It'd be risky. If you were caught it might be treated like swapping bar codes or like terrorism depending on where you are.

> Some ESLs are NFC enabled. You can tap your phone to get more infos on a product

Making you sure you've got your cell phone lets them pull data off of it and fingerprint the device. The goal is to use that info to gather real time feedback about you from data brokers, like how much money you have.

By all means, mess with these systems for laughs, but it's going to take actual laws with teeth and oversight to keep them from being abused.

good sir, what are you smoking, i wish for some to share.

If, as you rave, prices were adjusted per person as they walk up, how would the register ring up the correct adjusted prices, might i ask? and secondly, reading an NFC label exposes no unique IDs from the reader.

I also think that was a little too far fetched for the real world currently, but .. I'm not 100% certain. I have no doubt at all that there are sociopathic CEOs out there who would think this is an entirely reasonable proposition in order to increase profits.

But I also think that technically if they are tracking you in the store and adjusting the labels when you near products, it would not be difficult to show you that price that at the till, where they are still tracking you.

The real problem would be ensuring that the other customers were shown appropriate prices. Perhaps that would not be a problem I don't know. If three people are near a product, then just show the max price you think one of them is willing to pay, the others can suck it up? Perhaps the others weren't going to buy that in any case? You know one of them wants to buy that particular item, they always do. And, many people don't really look at the price labels in any case. If the store tags a person who will reject items as being too expensive at the till, then just charge them less than the price that was shown which they didn't look at when they picked it up. Once you move into the "profit above all" mindset of tracking customers and cynically adjusting the prices, it doesn't seem to me that anything would be out of bounds.

Also, I have been reading comments online for >10yrs from people claiming to work in the field, who have been saying that this stuff is already happening. Remember this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

You don’t need for every item. Just low frequency high profit goods

They've been working on it for a ling time now but the costs of the set up and consumer's understanding that it's unfair have slowed them down (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3)

Stores have already been setting up and using facial recognition. Home depot and walmart have been sued over it already.

the ufcw is pushing this narrative because they're continually afraid that they "threaten the jobs of grocery workers".

i guess the ufcw is stuck in an attitude that you can't train someone who was told "stick this piece of paper here on this shelf" to "stick this tag on this location on the shelf and scan a barcode".

gotta keep some stupidly low level clerk work available out there apparently.

Stores already uniquely identify customers with membership cards/accounts. They're also doing their damndest to link those more closely - see how Kroger is shifting from the Kroger card to digital coupons that require you to sign into an account.

They could simply offer the worst prices if you don't use your card (Kroger basically already does this), so you're effectively required to identify yourself.

> how would the register ring up the correct adjusted prices

Facial ID, "loyalty" cards, and device fingerprinting. Reading an NFC doesn't expose anything, but placing your phone next to a bluetooth beacon could, NFC+store app could, and so would your face.

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