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Comment by gps372 | Hacker News Reader

True, in-store planogram compliance and floor-plan compliance have got in focus again. It never lost the focus to be honest, just that now there is an expectation to do it while ensuring nothing fall through the cracks.

But there is a much more stringent privacy requirement here since customers walking in those stores haven't really signed up for this analysis. Hence, difficult to just setup the camera and take continuous data for analysis.

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Interesting on the privacy angle. I’m not sure anyone is really caring about that; there are lots of companies offering automated compliance services. I’m not super close to that industry but close enough that I’ve heard the pitches, and even the “no expectation of privacy in public” CYA has never come up.

What’s going to be fun are robotic stockers, racing to ensure compliance when a person/bot flagged as an auditor is in the store.

You’ll be reaching for the Pepsi and some robot will swoop in and replace the entire shelf with Coke when the Pepsi auditor walks into the store. Then you’ll reach to bottom shelf for your Coke and just as the robot swaps it back to eye level because the Coke auditor walked in. The store having sold the same placement to both.

(Ok, a bit far-fetched, but entertaining)

This might be already happening. Competitor's market share (without details) is common to share. Scintilla onboarded by Walmart earlier this year might already be giving instore AI capabilities.

>since customers walking in those stores haven't really signed up for this analysis

In the US at least there is no requirement for this. You're already being watched, tracked, and put in identification databases as it is.

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