Comment by windowliker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by windowliker | Hacker News Reader

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Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.

I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.

As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.

Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.

If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.

I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.

It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.

So maybe the problem is that you shouldn’t have self checkout if you cannot do it without immediately being stolen from?

The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier.

This is why I use the human-run checkout lines. I want to keep the humans employed.

Our high standard of living is due to machines doing the work rather than humans.

Part of our high standard of living relies on living in a high trust society, which self checkouts seem to erode.

All fine and dandy, but in the case of self-checkouts the cashier work is done by myself, and I'm not a machine.

I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.

You describe mobile handheld scanners that are a form of self-checkout in some stores, but not the norm. Most of the commenters here probably associate self-checkout with a station with touchscreen, scanner and bagging area.

I only use the mobile handheld scanner version. If someone has to go through all my items and scan them at the terminal, it's not going to be me; store clerks can do that much faster than I can.

> You describe mobile handheld scanners

Aka 'my phone', but yes. It's the same self-checkout machine (just only need to pay if you already scanned). Widespread in the UK at least.

Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.

> Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living

I did not say "all" machines. If I had meant "all" I would have written "all". That's what the word "all" is for.

Consider: "people like ice cream" Riposte: "not everybody likes ice cream"

I see this kind of response over and over here. It's cliched and irrelevant.

You both miss the crux of the argument, i think. It would be more precise to say that physical machines raise the standard of living that we measure, but abstract machines reduce that which we don't measure. (Viz, finance.)

Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.

GDP, measures of inflation: Goodhart's law.

It was implied. Why else would you use that argument in responding to ridgeguy's comment about using human-run checkout lines? What machines would you point to as making the world worse?

In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."

It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.

Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.

> It was implied.

No, it was not. When you inserted "all" you knew it was not implied.

Humans are still doing the work, except now it’s you instead of someone earning a wage. You do it for free!

It is not a machine, in this case. It's you, the customer, doing the work of the cashier.

Driving a car yourself is not "the machine doing the work of a bus driver".

Even after taking a higher percentage of shoplifting into account.

I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).

I wouldn't be surprised at half. If a worker sees others at the store stealing without consequence, they may be tempted to steal as well.

BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.

The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?

Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.

There's usually one person in charge of an array of self-checkouts, and the self-checkouts flag suspicious activity.

> I don’t see what the cameras add.

Again, stores would not spend money on self-checkouts and cameras if they didn't pay off.

So all the customer has to do is shoplift the item before the self checkout.

Yes, I've seen the videos on X of plenty of people doing just that. Then people complain that the stores close down.

In the Seattle area, the cities are trying to stop grocery stores from shutting down.

They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.

I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.

I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.

All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.

For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.

I didn’t know the cameras did that! Very dystopian. Smart that the guy found a bypass.

Some of it is just the camera, some of it is the camera + scale. The bagging area is a big scale to make sure stuff going in the bagging area was scanned. If the weight goes up without anything being scanned, or with the wrong weight, it will raise the alarm.

I’ve run into a couple situations where I was buying something light, like a greeting card, and the scale didn’t pick it up and was preventing me from moving on… waiting for me to bag the item. I threw my keys on the platform and that signaled I bagged the item and let me move on.

The scale at the store I shop at is sensitive enough to detect a paper bag.

But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.

The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.

I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.

>I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.

A likely excuse!!

Fortunately, I am a regular customer and they know me.

Of course they know you, they wrote the system with your tools ;-P

Hmm, not sure D is so heavily used anymore. Still mad respect to Walter!

They definitely know you are a regular customer. Their tracking database says you come here often.

Happens often from what I remember reading and most grocery stores account for the loss. Definitely lots of accidents as well.

There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.

> But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face

Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.

THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.

The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.

Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.

Retail groups had to retract claims of organized shoplifting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...

They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.

The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.

Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class

Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.

Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.

[1] lots of people truly need intervention but America uses therapy to cope with basic shit https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...

Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.

Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs

Do you even have crackheads in London? I was familiar with "crackhead" only as an American concept.

Yes actual crack is pretty popular among that demographic, the UK has a very good relatively low cost supply of cocaine.

The classic combo is Afghan buj + crack but synthetic opioids are starting to make an appearance now the CIA isn’t producing heroin anymore.

It’s nowhere near as bad as the west coast of the US obviously, that’s a whole other level.

I would normally use a different word than crackhead but I thought I’d use the internationally recognised term

Interesting. I always thought it was opioids that were the main problem in Europe.

No, it's metric. Our schools are flooded with 30cm rulers. You'll see kids as young as 8 with 330ml drinks. Some even count in decimal - there is no end in sight

Wastewater analysis shows cocaine is consumed massively ... in the financial district of London.

My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.

at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.

They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.

I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.

The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).

I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.

These businesses chose lower staffing costs knowing full well the price would be higher theft.

Not only there are cameras, but the machines typically accept only cards and not cash (except for one supermarket chain in my city) so I never use self-checkout.

you don't even need all of that to track people.

there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...

Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.

There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.

IIRC the big push to contactless and Oyster before it is just reducing the cost of handling money. Transit agencies do not really want to be in the business of banking, and physically printing paper tickets and maintaining the machines to accept them properly is a lot more expensive than an RFID reader.

In particular for paper and magnetic strip, you have to keep the reader clean enough to accept reads properly, and the machine also needs to not damage the ticket. This is a non issue with tapping.

Yep. Much like shopper cards and browser fingerprinting, it doesn’t take much to de-anonymize the data using the intersection of items.

I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.

Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.

As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.

About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.

Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.

Which is again, a fair question with a reasonable answer:

Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.

Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.

However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.

Terabytes for an entire chain isn't that much, actually?

Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.

You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.

If people would not steal stuff from shops, the shops would not need cameras. We get the society our behavior creates.

Isn't analytics the main reason for having cameras all over a store these days?

Do the cameras stop people stealing?

If I wanted to steal something, surely I'd do it before getting to the self checkout counter.

Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.

In Spanish supermarkets, it's tins of shellfish in the anti-theft boxes. In English ones, it's razor blades and menstrual pads. Spirits are often tagged in both countries, but not as consistently as the mejillones and the tampons.

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