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Comment by windowliker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!!

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

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

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

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!

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.

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