If they're collecting biometric data without posting a sign they are breaking the law, that requirement to post a sign is why this story about Wegmans is public at all, Wegmans posted signs as required.
If they are, and aren't posting signs, that would be a story in itself. Of course it could still be happening, it sounds like the law is fairly toothless, but it did get Wegmans to post the sign, so probably not useless.
A major point of facial recognition is to generate those consequences.
You don't have to try to physically stop them the moment they walk out, when there isn't time to call the police and you don't want a cashier getting physically involved and there's no security officer at the moment.
You have the evidence, and can call the cops the next time they enter the store.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Local member owned food co-ops would be a good alternative if there's one near you.
They don't have to be fancy and expensive. My local co-op strives to offer affordable options on most staples and bulk foods, and frequently undercuts the chains (including Wegmans) on produce, especially local produce when they can source it.
Do they have 20 types of chips and 300 cereals? No, but I can shop in a 20-30 minutes instead of the hour minimum Wegmans demands.
It recently dawned on me the cognitive simplicity of selecting a smaller store like the co-op. At our local one, the employees are really nice and selections really easy.
I have not yet moved over, but I can see a lot of advantages.
> "We trust our customers and do not conduct surveillance on them. When necessary, we take appropriate action, including having security cameras and security guards in our stores, to help ensure the safety of our customers and Crew Members," the company said.
That was in 2018 and it seems in 2024 they still do not have cameras. New locations I've seen do not either. I wouldn't be surprised if they weighed the cost of installing and maintaining cameras and the cost of "a string of robberies" and determined cameras were more expensive.
> Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I know of at least one chain that uses them to flag certain people to loss prevention or security when they enter the store, either because of shoplifting or because they were trespassed in the past.
I don't think people grasp how much control over how they are viewed by the business/government world they lost/have. Also, dynamic pricing is a pleasant sounding name for price gouging.
>This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I've heard the idea of combining multiple misdemeanor thefts to make a felony. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't that require an ongoing criminal conspiracy/enterprise to "combine" such disparate acts into a single, chargeable crime?
Some state laws do "upgrade" crimes, both misdemeanor --> felony and felony --> more serious felony based on prior convictions, but not (AFAIK) with multiple separate acts whose aggregate value is greater than the cutoff between petty theft and grand theft.
What's more, it's the local prosecutor who decides what charges to bring against someone accused of shoplifting, not the "Loss Prevention" team at a store or its corporate parent.
The idea just seems unlike how local/state laws and justice systems work in the US.
I could be (and likely am) wrong about this, but I've been unable to find state laws[0] which specify that multiple, separate acts of shoplifting can be combined into a single grand theft felony.
Would you share which states have such laws? It would be much appreciated!
There's aggregation laws that allow shoplifting incidents to be added up to a total charge.
Also, consider someone stealing small amounts over a year from a single store, a chain of stores or a group of stores with the same owners. The victims in these cases are the same entity.
That said, the trend in my area is for business owners to share data about accused shoplifters, help law enforcement with investigations, etc. I would not be surprised if they're all using a platform to do this these days.
>It makes a whole lot of sense, otherwise there is a loophole for unlimited stealing as Police/DAs do not want to waste time on misdemeanor theft.
Actually, this was already addressed (n.b., aggregation laws only exist in nine states, see GP's link here[1]) in most places by an increase in the severity of the crime charged for folks being convicted multiple times. cf. Alabama's law[0] as an example:
Enhanced Penalties for Theft Convictions in Alabama
Alabama law increases the penalties for habitual (repeat) felony offenders.
The length of the enhanced penalty depends on the number of past convictions
and the felony offense level for the current offense.
Second felony. For a second felony conviction, the sentence is raised one
level—for instance, a class B felony increases to a class A felony. This
penalty increase applies only to current offenses classified as class A, B,
or C felonies.
Third felony. A person with two prior felony offenses faces the following
minimum prison terms: 10 years for a class C felony, 15 years for a class B
felony, and 99 years for a class A felony.
Fourth felony. A fourth felony offense results in minimum prison terms of 15
years for a class C felony, 20 years for a class B felony, and life for a
class A felony.
Class D felony with prior convictions. When the current offense is a class D
felony and the person has two or more class A or B felony convictions or
three or more felonies in general, the penalty increases to a Class C felony.
(Ala. Code § 13A-5-9 (2024).)
Whatever information a "Loss Prevention" team has might be useful to a DA, but unless there's authentication and verified chain of custody of such evidence, the ability to fake such "video surveillance" makes such "evidence" not worth a damn.
You could always go to a Walmart and look up to see if they bothered to even wire the cameras or if the plug was literally dangling from the cameras over the entire store.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
> it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
Kroger had this too, which made every shopping trip take dramatically longer because the employees would already take 5-10 minutes to come over when they didn't have to reset every self-checkout every other item.
I refuse to shop anywhere that has them. We already have to deal with the constant "Please place item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in the bagging area.", why do we need extra aggravation when it's only going to slightly slow down a very specific class of shoplifter?
I would prefer they require face scanning vs. locking everything up. The police in my city don’t arrest people for shoplifting, or a range of petty crimes for that matter. If you don’t like face scanning no one makes you shop there.
When crime is unpunished and the police won’t do anything and the politicians don’t care, then businesses either have to adapt with new models or close
Police in my city are quite happy to lock people up for shoplifting. Random stores still lock up the majority of their inventory. I’m not sure how much that’s correlated.
Kind of a strange stance from someone with the name "monero-xmr". If scanning everyone's face for the purpose of going after petty crimes is justified, why shouldn't it be illegal to use monero for the purpose of going after other crimes?
You may also see stores revert to the 20th century model of having the mafia serve as private security. One reason they were so successful in some areas is that they were less corrupt and more responsive than the police.
The bad thing about mafia enforcement is you don’t get civil rights. Oh, and if the mob boss wants a favor then you’re going to have to oblige, even if it puts you at risk.
If police and DAs don’t take their jobs seriously, this is what they are inviting back into society.
That model also makes online shopping and delivery services easier to implement. I guess the issue is how labor intensive it is though. Instead of replacing cashiers with self checkout stands it goes in the opposite direction.
No, Costco is pretty much just a normal store with warehouse vibes. They mean where you hand a shopping list to an employee at the front and they get everything for you.
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
I’m friends with the manager of my neighborhood convenience store and he is extremely angry that he has shoplifting caught on tape, trespassed people, begged and pleaded with the police but they won’t do anything. I’m not sure if you actually know anyone operating a retail store but it’s pretty grim in the blue cities
The police rarely have ever been super responsive on shoplifting and basic trespass. I worked at a big box electronics store in the 90s, and we got looted when management did stupid shit like put hard drives on a retail shelf to save labor. The police rarely cared with some specific exception.
These cases are both minor and hard to prosecute.
The difference isn’t enforcement, it’s demand. The retail model as it stands today wasn’t designed for a world where there is a global market for everything. 95% people are honest, and most dishonest people are disorganized and easy to deter.
If you were to raid a drug store in 1986, your ability to unload stolen toothpaste and hair spray was pretty limited - maybe some mafias had a network of bodegas or independent stores.
Today, you have a major corporation that prides itself at having the “world‘s largest selection”. It’s also the worlds largest fence — Amazon.
The symptoms you're describing don't seem to match the proposed treatment.
Police: "You've caught them red-handed on camera, but we're very busy and we don't care. Or perhaps this is a place where we're deliberately doing-nothing as a revenge or pressure-tactic against local politicians."
Shopkeeper: "Ah, but this time I have the camera-footage and fancy biometrics of everyone in the store!"
Police: "Oh, well why didn't you say so? That completely changes things, we're always willing to help out a fellow biometrics fan."
> Police will not arrest if the DA won't prosecute.
Why not? If the police are frustrated that the DAs aren’t doing their job, I don’t think it helps the police any to choose to also not do their job. Especially since DAs are often elected, which means it’s easier to replace them if the police can show that they (the DA) are the bottleneck. But if the police don’t do their job first, then the police are the bottleneck.
Depends on the judges. If police cannot prove the crime in front of the judge, they wasted their time. With proper evidence it's not a waste of time anymore.
Progressive prosecutors don’t care. Judges let repeat offenders out with a wrist slap. Demoralizes police - what’s the point of all the effort if they are back out on the street tomorrow?
Repeat shoplifters? Please that’s a thinly veiled excuse, the actual reason is so they can build more accurate analytical models to screw you over more.
I don't doubt that the biometrics analytics dystopia is coming, but shoplifting is a huge issue in some areas. Biometrics surveillance still sucks, but I'll believe it is about theft at this time.
Do facial recognition systems actually reduce or prevent shoplifting by any significant amount? Most shops in my non-us area will have a no approach policy, call the police and report it, but most offenders are presumably habitual.
I'm sure you can imagine some dark patterns.
Screens that show you products they want you to buy based on your patterns. Discounted offers tailored to you that are not really discounts.
It's not only at groceries stores, it's everywhere. For example at TSA security line and (sometimes) when boarding flights at the gate. You can (and should) exercise your right to opt-out every single time, before that right is taken away.
Omg I sound like Richard Stallman... anyway, he was right all along.
I used to always opt out at TSA checkpoints. Then I decided that of all places, the airport makes the most sense to use biometrics. I mean, a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent.
What scares me about TSA using it is that it normalizes its use. Next it's at stadiums. Then Wegmans. If it would stop at airports, then I would be okay with it.
Regardless of the fact that they can simply lie to you, it doesn't say that. The question is "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos)...?" What does protect mean? The stated common case is that a photo is ephemeral and is removed (from where?) after it is used. Now, they're using it for facial recognition. They didn't get a facial recognition system by deleting photos, so we know based on the premise that some representation of the data in the photo (your likeness) exists in persistent form.
But that's just generous reading, anyway. There are so many ambiguities that it's not really worth the trouble to attempt any rigorous analysis of it.
"In rare instances TSA will collect and temporarily retain photos and data..." How rare? Doesn't matter: then what happens?
"...data collection mode events are limited in time and place..." Damn unrelenting spacetime.
"TSA’s facial comparison technologies adhere to DHS and TSA cybersecurity requirements." Restatement of the problem.
To get actual answers (at least during sane political administrations), the System of Records Notice (“SORN”) is what you want. Whereas the info sites for these programs are typically useless, SORNs are the authoritative document that the federal government issues to identify and characterize systems that store records about data subjects, and include information about retention polices, exceptions, etc.
The last I read the SORN for TSA’s facial recognition, they did commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours.
CBP operates their facial recognition under a different SORN, and there are many more caveats, although they also commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours for US citizens (only).
> Now, they're using it for facial recognition. They didn't get a facial recognition system by deleting photos, so we know based on the premise that some representation of the data in the photo (your likeness) exists in persistent form.
If we want to be truly generous in interpreting it, the new sample would be deleted and the comparison is done against the photos they have on file from your ID/passport (although, since a foreigner can do it on their first visit to the US, it might just be based on scanning the document you provide). Of course, single-sample-per-person facial recognition is pretty limited, but it's security theater anyways.
That's too generous because even that document says that there that data is used for other purposes without detailing any of that. There are no timelines. Even when they say "temporary," when is that? Until 2300? Temporarily stored on the device until it's been stored remotely? Temporary until the NN is trained?
The cat's out of the bag, anyway. They already have a perfect dataset and surveillance mechanism. But it'd be nice to stop continuing to perfect it.
Agreed. Provides no obvious benefit to either me or society at large. Normalizes collection of biometrics. Implementation details not easy to verify - they could be lying or could silently change things later.
The entire scheme has a very high abuse potential. Equipment and personnel set up at major ports and their presence normalized. Turnkey authoritarianism at its finest.
I just flew from the US to Europe; at each point where I had to get my picture taken, the machine had a label on it that clearly said they would delete my data after 24 hours. (Or after use, I don't remember the precise time frame.)
Were they lying? Possibly. But this is not a matter of them trying to use weasel wording to trick you into thinking they're claiming something they're not.
You think they could be lying, but your argument is that they're being candid? Then we simply see it differently. I just read the primary source, so I know without a doubt that it's weasely.
Moreover, it was put forward as proof that they don't keep the data, but the source is actually called "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos) collected." What are they protecting if they don't have it? What would be the point of even doing this if they don't collect it?
But leave that aside and let's talk about your experience. Did it say the data would be deleted after 24 hours or did it say it would be deleted after use? What is use? Use could be we're operating a giant biometric database and we intend to keep doing it until the asteroid, and why wouldn't it be that?
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that if they are lying, they are doing so flat-out, not by using weasel words—because the wording they used at the point of disservice was very clear that they would be deleting them, not just "we will protect your data."
I'm not attempting to defend the TSA; I think they're reprehensible. I wish merely to provide new facts into the discussion.
Make sure to opt-out before handing your ID over to the agent. They will claim you can no longer opt-out at that point, even before scanning. I had one plead to my wife to go through, because they are being watched by management and it wouldn't look good.
What really annoys me is when I politely decline the facial scan of TSA, and the agent makes some snide comment about my picture on my identification or something. And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I'm pretty sure they're told some things to say. I overheard one telling someone the line about how it doesn't matter because there's cameras everywhere so you shouldn't opt out. Bizarrely, the agents seemed to be checking IDs manually that day!
>And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I get the temptation to do this, I really do, but I really don't recommend this. The TSA is in a position to make your day much worse. It's better just to opt-out and say nothing. Opting out is well within your rights (it's posted on the sign at the start of the line).
Follow instructions. Keep your mouth shut. Eyes forward. On your way.
OTOH, if that person can afford it by not belonging to a vulnerable group, they should be the one to be a bit of a pain in the ass in the face of intrusive practices.
> Ask Wegmans directly to exclude you from facial recognition - Send an email to their privacy team
The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.
Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.
I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"
They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.
I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!
The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.
The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.
Some places that would do face recognition would not do gait analysis, and so you defeat those. Additionally, if you prevent them from doing face recognition and they can do gait recognition, they will be forced to use gait recognition, which is likely more expensive or less reliable, which will limit their ability to do it in a widespread fashion or cost them more to do so.
Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.
It’s unreliable and difficult. The most recent failure (made the news) was the laughable attempt to link the J6 bomber to a random police officer. Gait analysis belongs in the movies or maybe in some one-off national security investigation where nothing else is available.
I don't know your financial situation but a N95 mask can't cost you more than 10$? I can find 10 packs for less than 10$.
You can even reuse your shopping mask since you primary point is privacy and not air borne pathogens.
Yes, in the same way stored passwords of today may eventually be broken by the quantum computing tools of tomorrow.
The post I replied to implied that gait analysis is a viable alternative option. Gait analysis is not an option today, or this year, or even in the next decade. There is no data supporting the claim that it can be done reliably enough to get down to practical reidentification use cases.
American's do not have the power to make things illegal. We have a representative democracy. Why it fails to represent the will of the people has been a good debate for the past 30 years.
We frequently won't even suggest it, at least on HN. Its always derided by "how will it be enforced? There are ways to evade it!". Always letting perfect be the enemy of good.
That’s just not possible because it’s unenforceable at best and ignores the myriad ways around it “legally” that still would be workable even if it’s “illegal”
For example it’s illegal to hire foreign undocumented labor but in literally zero of the companies who have been raided recently the only people punished were the working people who are just trying to live
Allow enforcement by awarding whistleblower bounties via civil courts. Give standing for civil suits to be brought forth a la Texas' bounty laws if regulators won't enforce the law.
All that does is create a new middle layer of auditors who are de facto government stooges in contractor outfits
They take your money so that you can be compliant with the Kafkaesque language of the law, such that you can continue to do what you wanna do, but now you’re actually protected under the law with a specific proviso through this new middleman.
And so that’s when you get industry groups lobby in Congress to say we need to do this without the other at the federal level.
There’s no way you’re gonna be able to actually figure this out because laws don’t work to protect citizens, laws are intended to protect business interests. Like that is unambiguous and undisputed at this point.
We have in other domains, there's a reason whistleblower protections and rewards exist.
There needs to be protections and incentives for, for example, low level employees to report their employers when they're privy to them breaking the law.
I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
>I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
I agree. I'm not sure making the employer-employee relationship worse to prevent it actually makes it better though. Every retail company is doing some amount of security stuff that's adjacent to this even if they're being tasteful.
Can we try "just" making it like normal levels of illegal before we make the employer-employee relationship dynamic worse in any workplace where data that could be used in this way is at all relevant?
Implementing workers' rights and protections for whistleblowers improves the employer-employee relationship by protecting honest employees from retaliation from employers who are already intent on violating the law.
I dare you to explain how without using a) an example where in the absence of law trust would not also be breached b) claiming the tipster's trust is breached because they inherit that breach through the N levels of government above them until you get to a level that both the narc and the IRS inherit from c) making some assertion that would create either insanity or hilarity if used to reason about other mundane illegality (e.g bringing some personal weed through a non legal state).
Also the cash under the table workforce is alive and well wheras the mail order drugs industry goes through great pains to structure itself and engage in opsec such that trust is not needed. That would seem to indicated that tax evasion is not inherently a breach of trust.
I think we're far past the point where you can avoid being tracked anywhere in the world, and that's even if you wear sunglasses, a hat, and you use no technology (no phone, etc).
Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".
If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.
Maybe, but they're also incentivized to make people believe they are doing more than they are, and with higher accuracy, because it makes people give up entirely and make no effort to protect their privacy.
you're seeing a script block from cloudflare’s bot protection. we’re actively working to reduce third-party surveillance on our systems, including evaluating less invasive alternatives to aggressive bot mitigation.
if you’ve got ideas or want to help us test better solutions, we’re totally open — reach out.
and what's that? oh right! we’re one of the few sites that still respects do not track — and always have.
How do I get Kroger to not scan my face? All these grocer companies are doing this same market analysis seemingly without giving good faith notice. I guess they are not legally required to inform their targets. It seems there needs to be some improvement in consumer protection laws. Dunnhumby and 84.51° are thick into this "taking".
so even if you don't have your face scanned on the register, unless you're paying cash they'd still know who you are right? don't most people have passports? real ID is also a thing. if you're concerned about a hostile government wearing a mask at a grocery store isn't going to do anything sadly. not even counting things like gait analysis, security cameras or tracking your phone
Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).
personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.
- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do
> law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict,
Or, amazing life hack, don’t do crimes, on video or otherwise.
Not saying there are no privacy concerns, but I WANT this used in court against criminals
Do you agree that all current laws are just and correct, and are you confident that nobody will ever come into power who wants to make illegal something you believe is just and right to do?
I don't disagree, but I don't think private companies should be able to both keep videos indefinitely and for those videos to be accessible to the government for arbitrary goals.
I do pay cash. I don't have a passport. You can opt out of Real ID.
Anyways, the solution, as always, is noise. They leave their data pipelines open and assume all the data is mostly clean. There needs to be a massive technological development for the population to just clog those channels with so much noise they become effectively useless.
You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?
These are not private stores. They are open to the public. This comes with several other requirements that a truly "private store" would not have to follow. There is a massive body of law which defines this.
"Being open to the public" doesn't mean they cannot use surveillance. They also have the right to ask you to leave, enforce clothing standards, etc. It's a private business - and a private building. They have a lot of rights about what happens within the premises.
If you disagree, you can choose to shop somewhere else. It's literally that simple.
Even if the law didn’t, humans have a basic right to privacy and anonymity from for-profit entities when completing life essential tasks. We’ve just become so cooked that it’s not even considered a problem for most, and not mandated by law to the extent that it should be.
I fear people will just get used to it just like other means of mass surveillance then wonder why they're being harassed with petty pretexts based on this data.
This is already the case. The largest supermarket chain in my relatively wealthy area has had multiple cameras per aisle hanging about ~3 feet above your head + monitors in each aisle that show some, but not all, camera views, for over a decade now.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
> I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
They literally have nothing better to do so this, traffic enforcement and bothering kids who are trying to have a good time are the bulk of their duty, so I'd agree.
> It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I think a certain kind of person is comforted by surveillance. They perceive it, usually somewhat correctly from places of immense privilege, to be for their benefit and protection. They idea that it would be used against them, who are Good, and not against those people, who are Bad, is laughable to them if the concept even crosses their minds.
Maybe you're one of those people if the cameras bother you, is the sentiment.
What I was getting at is that these richer areas are pretty bimodal. They either support the shit out of the police or they think that enforcing petty theft laws are racist and both cases lead to more orwellian crap (the latter because the retailer has to basically serve up felony prosecutions on a silver platter if they want anything to happen).
I don't think there is any alternative to this. I assume every corporation is filming me in their stores, building shopper profiles, that granularly identify me in every conceivable way. I am not surprised at all that Wegmans is taking a picture of my face. It's good to know, it's good for this to be in the news, but I can't imagine any grocery store, not taking advantage of video surveillance, profiling, all of that stuff if it will help them sell more.
FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
This is defeatist. You imply that local retailers are in on this as well, I know for a fact that my local co-op is not. Neither is the local farm stand or the local salvage grocery store. If you aren’t in a huge metro, shop local and you’ll do fine.
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
I want people to finally get mad enough that they do something about it instead of sitting here with half ass solutions and just bitching about it.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
Didn’t expect a reply, so thanks for replying. Getting people active may be your intent, but it comes off like a demoralization campaign. I don’t know who is involved in it or why (although I can guess), but there is a lot of intentional demoralization in these surveillance and privacy threads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)
If you really want people to fight, it’s better to use fighting words, to cheer on allies who are fighting, or to give examples of how you have successfully fought back. This also counters attempts at demoralization.
Comfortable people don’t start, maintain or complete revolutions.
Shit’s gonna have to get really really bad really really quickly for anybody to actually seriously mobilize against the reality of the insanity that you live inside.
It’s just so fundamentally corrupt and broken at every possible level
Anyone suggesting that we need some kind of relatively small skin procedure when the patient has stage four skin cancer is still living in a dream world
There is a difference between agitation and demoralization. Demoralization often has the opposite of the intended effect. People shut down and stop resisting, they defect to the other team, they abuse substances or in extreme cases they self-harm, all because they are convinced that resistance is impossible. None of this advances your revolutionary goals. Demoralization is collaboration with the enemy.
I reject this concept that there’s some kind of intentional demoralization happening here
If people feel demoralized it’s because they can’t generate the rage necessary to turn information into physical action
If someone is overwhelmed by it then that is a indictment that should give people pause and ask “why is my response to fear to freeze fawn or flight instead of fight”
Ultimately if the plurality of humans roll over and die when encountered with overwhelming force, then so be it and that’s the result, and they will go the way of Neanderthal
If people are not enraged then they are being intentionally ignorant and ultimately theres nothing to save
Your very competent opponents have studied this problem and found that people can be manipulated through careful application of psychological warfare techniques.
Ultimately your position boils down to “I would rather lose than alter my tactics because humans don’t behave as I’d like them to.” Your opponents will happily oblige you.
You claim that you’re trying to wake people up. I think you should be more honest with yourself. You’re mocking the people for their own failures as they go under.
My hope is that people wake up but I do not have any confidence that that is actually going to happen, as I stated
You use the word “mocking” but it’s inappropriate here - a better word to use would be “challenging” or “agitating.”
Ultimately if my life is surrounded by a bunch of robots who can do all the things that are necessary in order to move the epistemological foundations of reality forward that’s more than I could say for any collection of humans.
After over 40 years of experience as a human I can tell you definitively the humans are the number one problem in the world.
Well I guess we have the same hopes and frustrations, the difference is that I try to encourage people who are aligned with me. Motivated people with encouragement and a positive mindset can accomplish much. Demotivated people retreat to their homes and wither away.
I think the reaction to COVID in which we not only haven't improved our behavior regarding the problem of infectious disease but have regressed even further has shown that accelerationism is not a viable strategy for dealing with long-term problems whose effects are often not immediately and directly visible and which require inconvenience to solve.
Well we know that education didn’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that command economies don’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that formal hierarchies don’t work so that’s not a solution
Have any solutions?
Humans can only really coherently plan at the global scale required on the order of months into the future
However our activities, even at the individual level (burning a tire for example) have extreme impacts and costs on extant populations globally and future populations.
It’s like we completely stopped talking about climate change and how the ecological collapse is about to punch everybody in the throat.
This is a mathematical formula that does not have a solution
The only possible solution is to change the properties of the atomic unit which is individual human actor
Since we cannot change the foundational biology of humanity then there is a impossible to solve problem here if there is a desire to retain the human element in the future. I stopped desiring a human future about 30 years ago because it makes no sense.
The biological limitations of the human species is now the single weakest link of all possible futures.
That was not true before (insert your preferred period, upper paleolithic, neolithic, industrial revolution etc…) but has only been accelerating since.
Unless some absolutely foundational things change, like the foundational functioning of human systems, then we will continue this cycle of destruction forever.
They always show me my total before the cars swipe, so as long as the obfuscation works until the card swipe, at least it would prevent dynamic pricing.
I mean that assumes that you can’t assign the highest price to non-facially recognized people.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
I largely thought this wouldn’t work, but having tried it at several grocery store chains while traveling with a 100% success rate so far I’m not complaining. (Nothing worse then being told you can’t sign up because customer service is closed, and you have to sign up to get the pricing, and there’s no generic store card they can scan as a curtesy ).
- this has worked for me in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
I'll share this here now that I only drive EVs, but I suppose cashiers and random people at King Soopers(major grocer in Colorado, associated with Kroger's) would enter 555-555-5555 as their phone number for their rewards, and every time I would pump gas at their stations I would get $1/gallon off.
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
> Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
The problem is not if a bank can track individual legal tender and associate it with an account holder, but instead if a company which is not a bank (such as a grocery store) could determine same.
In other words, how would a merchant be able to establish a specific $20 USD bill was used by a specific person?
No bank would share this information with an entity other than law enforcement and likely would require a court ordered subpoena to do so.
We need a startup to make those super realistic face masks easy to make and use. Celebrities could license their faces to make up for movies and tv being AI generated.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
> I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
How does surveillance prevalent with online delivery services substantially differ from biometric ones?
> In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
This just doesn't make sense.
Are you asserting that people going into grocery stores now are more likely to commit theft due to those using online delivery services no longer engaging in on-premise shopping?
Or is it your premise that people who typically use online delivery services only go into grocery stores to steal?
Are you suggesting that a shift to online shopping led to a new demographic going to grocery stores in person? I would have expected that demographic would have went to grocery stores all along. What has changed that introduced a new demographic? And why does it mean security has to change?
Overall foot traffic is down in stores. People who shop online don't go to the store as often, and when they do they expect a worthwhile experience and to probably spend more. They're going to the grocery stores with the craft beer on tap, proper restaurants, etc. They know their online shopping is already monitored and cashless, so it's only a minor annoyance to see that in person. Not many are going to walk away just because of that. Those nicer stores are also in the wealthier neighborhoods where the expectation is safety while they spend extra time with the shiny new amenities in a smaller more peaceful crowd.
The people who avoid online and delivery may not have a choice and are more price sensitive or likely to shoplift, so those other stores also have to increase security.
I'm saying that people have become segregated. The suburbanite middle and upper classes don't "stop by on the way home from work" anymore and they aren't leaving home just to shop unless it's worth the hassle. They expect much higher levels of convenience and safety than ever before. Increased security everywhere makes sense.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Just because they haven't announced it doesn't mean they're not using it.
Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
All those security cameras are there for a reason.
If they're collecting biometric data without posting a sign they are breaking the law, that requirement to post a sign is why this story about Wegmans is public at all, Wegmans posted signs as required.
If they are, and aren't posting signs, that would be a story in itself. Of course it could still be happening, it sounds like the law is fairly toothless, but it did get Wegmans to post the sign, so probably not useless.
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-wegmans-is-storing-biometric-...
I havent been seeing any stores prosecute theft in a long time.
How many stores did you see prosecute theft before that "long time" ?
~ from Examining Court Processing of Shoplifting Before and After the Passage of Mississippi House Bill 585 https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/9910.pdfSee also Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft (2024) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth...
They arrest, but then don't prosecute. It's been catch and release for a while.
To be fair to OP I didn't see people come in and blatantly steal items and walk out as if there were no consequiences.
In NYC before Covid, I never saw it. After, many many times.
A major point of facial recognition is to generate those consequences.
You don't have to try to physically stop them the moment they walk out, when there isn't time to call the police and you don't want a cashier getting physically involved and there's no security officer at the moment.
You have the evidence, and can call the cops the next time they enter the store.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Local member owned food co-ops would be a good alternative if there's one near you.
They don't have to be fancy and expensive. My local co-op strives to offer affordable options on most staples and bulk foods, and frequently undercuts the chains (including Wegmans) on produce, especially local produce when they can source it.
Do they have 20 types of chips and 300 cereals? No, but I can shop in a 20-30 minutes instead of the hour minimum Wegmans demands.
It recently dawned on me the cognitive simplicity of selecting a smaller store like the co-op. At our local one, the employees are really nice and selections really easy. I have not yet moved over, but I can see a lot of advantages.
At least Trader Joe's does not have surveillance cameras (at all). https://dan.bulwinkle.net/blog/trader-joes-does-not-have-sur...
They don't... except when they do:
> "We trust our customers and do not conduct surveillance on them. When necessary, we take appropriate action, including having security cameras and security guards in our stores, to help ensure the safety of our customers and Crew Members," the company said.
https://abc7.com/post/trader-joes-targeted-in-7-socal-armed-...
That was in 2018 and it seems in 2024 they still do not have cameras. New locations I've seen do not either. I wouldn't be surprised if they weighed the cost of installing and maintaining cameras and the cost of "a string of robberies" and determined cameras were more expensive.
Trade Joe's maybe I could see but how did Whole Foods make this list?
> Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I know of at least one chain that uses them to flag certain people to loss prevention or security when they enter the store, either because of shoplifting or because they were trespassed in the past.
If only this was the only use and the data wasn't sold/used against people not committing crimes.
Yup, that was their initial pitch, now the data is further abused for profit.
The data shouldn't exist in the first place, and neither should surveilled society.
I don't think people grasp how much control over how they are viewed by the business/government world they lost/have. Also, dynamic pricing is a pleasant sounding name for price gouging.
Was that in the article?
It's a misuse of the data collected
>This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I've heard the idea of combining multiple misdemeanor thefts to make a felony. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't that require an ongoing criminal conspiracy/enterprise to "combine" such disparate acts into a single, chargeable crime?
Some state laws do "upgrade" crimes, both misdemeanor --> felony and felony --> more serious felony based on prior convictions, but not (AFAIK) with multiple separate acts whose aggregate value is greater than the cutoff between petty theft and grand theft.
What's more, it's the local prosecutor who decides what charges to bring against someone accused of shoplifting, not the "Loss Prevention" team at a store or its corporate parent.
The idea just seems unlike how local/state laws and justice systems work in the US.
I could be (and likely am) wrong about this, but I've been unable to find state laws[0] which specify that multiple, separate acts of shoplifting can be combined into a single grand theft felony.
Would you share which states have such laws? It would be much appreciated!
[0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa... [1]
[1] See the bottom of the page for links to most US state laws.
There's aggregation laws that allow shoplifting incidents to be added up to a total charge.
Also, consider someone stealing small amounts over a year from a single store, a chain of stores or a group of stores with the same owners. The victims in these cases are the same entity.
That said, the trend in my area is for business owners to share data about accused shoplifters, help law enforcement with investigations, etc. I would not be surprised if they're all using a platform to do this these days.
See also:
- https://legalclarity.org/do-stores-build-cases-on-shoplifter...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/organized-retail-crime-nine-...
- https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/12/30/new-in-2025-cracking-down-...
- https://www.davisfirmllc.com/blog/the-retail-theft-aggregati...
- https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/monica...
Thanks!
It makes a whole lot of sense, otherwise there is a loophole for unlimited stealing as Police/DAs do not want to waste time on misdemeanor theft.
Also, you don't want to criminalize the person who stole one small thing vs serial shoplifter.
>It makes a whole lot of sense, otherwise there is a loophole for unlimited stealing as Police/DAs do not want to waste time on misdemeanor theft.
Actually, this was already addressed (n.b., aggregation laws only exist in nine states, see GP's link here[1]) in most places by an increase in the severity of the crime charged for folks being convicted multiple times. cf. Alabama's law[0] as an example:
Whatever information a "Loss Prevention" team has might be useful to a DA, but unless there's authentication and verified chain of custody of such evidence, the ability to fake such "video surveillance" makes such "evidence" not worth a damn.[0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/organized-retail-crime-nine-...
> I would just assume every grocery store
Every large chain does.
> All those security cameras are there for a reason.
To show you that they can afford them. As if cameras are a reasonable way to stop shoplifting in the first place.
> As if cameras are a reasonable way to stop shoplifting in the first place.
How are they not?
They're pretty essentially both for catching a lot of shoplifting in the first place, as well as providing evidence in court.
Exactly. Its only useful after the fact. I he shoplifting has already occurred. Cameras do not stop shoplifts. It creates a record after the fact.
They serve as a deterrent for "honest" thieves. Knowing you are being recorded prevents many crimes.
Not all crimes. But many crimes.
Whole Foods by me has a palm scanner, and the Amazon Fresh store does biometrics too (at least it used to?
The Whole Foods palm scanner is optional, though. I've never seen anyone use it.
You could always go to a Walmart and look up to see if they bothered to even wire the cameras or if the plug was literally dangling from the cameras over the entire store.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
Unfortunatelly this is incorrect. Do not be fooled by the decoys. They do it to customers, employees, and contractors.
Walmart was sued [0] for exactly what Wegmans just started in 2022,
Walmart is sued [1] by delivery drivers,
and, so on.
[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/privacy/bipa...
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/walm...
[2] https://caseguard.com/articles/retail-corporation-walmart-fa...
Seems like it’s changed in the decades. I watched the same guy steal 100s of dollars of shit over a few months.
The store I worked at was also a shitshow that barely operated so maybe I was just in their local minimum.
Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
> it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
Kroger had this too, which made every shopping trip take dramatically longer because the employees would already take 5-10 minutes to come over when they didn't have to reset every self-checkout every other item.
I refuse to shop anywhere that has them. We already have to deal with the constant "Please place item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in the bagging area.", why do we need extra aggravation when it's only going to slightly slow down a very specific class of shoplifter?
They could also be hanging obvious decoys to lure the criminal-prone to action that the real, better hidden, ones capture
I would prefer they require face scanning vs. locking everything up. The police in my city don’t arrest people for shoplifting, or a range of petty crimes for that matter. If you don’t like face scanning no one makes you shop there.
When crime is unpunished and the police won’t do anything and the politicians don’t care, then businesses either have to adapt with new models or close
Police in my city are quite happy to lock people up for shoplifting. Random stores still lock up the majority of their inventory. I’m not sure how much that’s correlated.
Arresting literally anyone except the repeat offenders that make the media would be a good start. It’s a joke right now
Kind of a strange stance from someone with the name "monero-xmr". If scanning everyone's face for the purpose of going after petty crimes is justified, why shouldn't it be illegal to use monero for the purpose of going after other crimes?
Your [popular on HN] anti-crypto crusade doesn't make this a logical comparison.
XMR is not illegal to use or own, shoplifting is.
Something being illegal is not a blank check for unchecked surveillance.
These stores should just convert to a 19th century retail model and not allow customers to enter the stockroom.
You may also see stores revert to the 20th century model of having the mafia serve as private security. One reason they were so successful in some areas is that they were less corrupt and more responsive than the police.
The bad thing about mafia enforcement is you don’t get civil rights. Oh, and if the mob boss wants a favor then you’re going to have to oblige, even if it puts you at risk.
If police and DAs don’t take their jobs seriously, this is what they are inviting back into society.
That model also makes online shopping and delivery services easier to implement. I guess the issue is how labor intensive it is though. Instead of replacing cashiers with self checkout stands it goes in the opposite direction.
So Costco?
No, Costco is pretty much just a normal store with warehouse vibes. They mean where you hand a shopping list to an employee at the front and they get everything for you.
See that’s exactly the type of thing I want to avoid. I would like to get back to a normal world where stealing is wrong and police arrest thieves
Or they could continue taking a small % of loss, remain wildly profitable and not abuse people.
Make the rest of us pay 7% more so thieves can loot businesses and avoid getting a real job? How about no
This is a false either/or.
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
December 2023: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret...
I’m friends with the manager of my neighborhood convenience store and he is extremely angry that he has shoplifting caught on tape, trespassed people, begged and pleaded with the police but they won’t do anything. I’m not sure if you actually know anyone operating a retail store but it’s pretty grim in the blue cities
The police rarely have ever been super responsive on shoplifting and basic trespass. I worked at a big box electronics store in the 90s, and we got looted when management did stupid shit like put hard drives on a retail shelf to save labor. The police rarely cared with some specific exception.
These cases are both minor and hard to prosecute.
The difference isn’t enforcement, it’s demand. The retail model as it stands today wasn’t designed for a world where there is a global market for everything. 95% people are honest, and most dishonest people are disorganized and easy to deter.
If you were to raid a drug store in 1986, your ability to unload stolen toothpaste and hair spray was pretty limited - maybe some mafias had a network of bodegas or independent stores.
Today, you have a major corporation that prides itself at having the “world‘s largest selection”. It’s also the worlds largest fence — Amazon.
You really need to figure out how to get the police to do their job.
The symptoms you're describing don't seem to match the proposed treatment.
Police: "You've caught them red-handed on camera, but we're very busy and we don't care. Or perhaps this is a place where we're deliberately doing-nothing as a revenge or pressure-tactic against local politicians."
Shopkeeper: "Ah, but this time I have the camera-footage and fancy biometrics of everyone in the store!"
Police: "Oh, well why didn't you say so? That completely changes things, we're always willing to help out a fellow biometrics fan."
You forgot the local DA that run on a political stance to NOT be tough on crime. Police will not arrest if the DA won't prosecute.
> Police will not arrest if the DA won't prosecute.
Why not? If the police are frustrated that the DAs aren’t doing their job, I don’t think it helps the police any to choose to also not do their job. Especially since DAs are often elected, which means it’s easier to replace them if the police can show that they (the DA) are the bottleneck. But if the police don’t do their job first, then the police are the bottleneck.
That is great and I agree with you, but not how things work on the streets, at least in NYC.
> but not how things work on the streets, at least in NYC
Then how do things work on the streets in NYC?
Depends on the judges. If police cannot prove the crime in front of the judge, they wasted their time. With proper evidence it's not a waste of time anymore.
So the reason is that they are afraid of bringing case with witnesses and video footage to a judge because it might be too flimsy?
Progressive prosecutors don’t care. Judges let repeat offenders out with a wrist slap. Demoralizes police - what’s the point of all the effort if they are back out on the street tomorrow?
Sounds like you have a narrative that you are going to believe no matter what.
...Do you, perhaps, detect some sort of a difference between your neighborhood convenience store, and Wal-Mart?
Perhaps some differences in level of power?
Perhaps some differences in the degree to which police are willing to bend over backward for them, vs blowing them off?
Repeat shoplifters? Please that’s a thinly veiled excuse, the actual reason is so they can build more accurate analytical models to screw you over more.
I don't doubt that the biometrics analytics dystopia is coming, but shoplifting is a huge issue in some areas. Biometrics surveillance still sucks, but I'll believe it is about theft at this time.
Do facial recognition systems actually reduce or prevent shoplifting by any significant amount? Most shops in my non-us area will have a no approach policy, call the police and report it, but most offenders are presumably habitual.
No, it’s the shoplifting. Don’t be obtuse.
Wow yes your fact based argument has changed my opinion. Praise be.
Screw you over, how, exactly?
There are arguments about how companies will use collected data in undesirable ways.
But I wish that the stress of living in a panopticon would be argument enough.
I'm sure you can imagine some dark patterns. Screens that show you products they want you to buy based on your patterns. Discounted offers tailored to you that are not really discounts.
Region / time of day / per-demographic brand-popularity based pricing for a start?
Juice is not worth the squeeze if the customers who spend more shop online.
You think online retailers don't do these things?
Brick and mortar do it too.
It's not only at groceries stores, it's everywhere. For example at TSA security line and (sometimes) when boarding flights at the gate. You can (and should) exercise your right to opt-out every single time, before that right is taken away. Omg I sound like Richard Stallman... anyway, he was right all along.
I used to always opt out at TSA checkpoints. Then I decided that of all places, the airport makes the most sense to use biometrics. I mean, a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent.
What scares me about TSA using it is that it normalizes its use. Next it's at stadiums. Then Wegmans. If it would stop at airports, then I would be okay with it.
> a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent
Not at all? A human isn't committing you to long term memory let alone entering a detailed sketch into a centralized database.
No. TSA deletes the information it captures after 24 hours.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequently-asked-questions/does-t...
Regardless of the fact that they can simply lie to you, it doesn't say that. The question is "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos)...?" What does protect mean? The stated common case is that a photo is ephemeral and is removed (from where?) after it is used. Now, they're using it for facial recognition. They didn't get a facial recognition system by deleting photos, so we know based on the premise that some representation of the data in the photo (your likeness) exists in persistent form.
But that's just generous reading, anyway. There are so many ambiguities that it's not really worth the trouble to attempt any rigorous analysis of it.
"In rare instances TSA will collect and temporarily retain photos and data..." How rare? Doesn't matter: then what happens?
"...data collection mode events are limited in time and place..." Damn unrelenting spacetime.
"TSA’s facial comparison technologies adhere to DHS and TSA cybersecurity requirements." Restatement of the problem.
To get actual answers (at least during sane political administrations), the System of Records Notice (“SORN”) is what you want. Whereas the info sites for these programs are typically useless, SORNs are the authoritative document that the federal government issues to identify and characterize systems that store records about data subjects, and include information about retention polices, exceptions, etc.
The last I read the SORN for TSA’s facial recognition, they did commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours.
CBP operates their facial recognition under a different SORN, and there are many more caveats, although they also commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours for US citizens (only).
That was in late 2024 anyway.
> Now, they're using it for facial recognition. They didn't get a facial recognition system by deleting photos, so we know based on the premise that some representation of the data in the photo (your likeness) exists in persistent form.
If we want to be truly generous in interpreting it, the new sample would be deleted and the comparison is done against the photos they have on file from your ID/passport (although, since a foreigner can do it on their first visit to the US, it might just be based on scanning the document you provide). Of course, single-sample-per-person facial recognition is pretty limited, but it's security theater anyways.
That's too generous because even that document says that there that data is used for other purposes without detailing any of that. There are no timelines. Even when they say "temporary," when is that? Until 2300? Temporarily stored on the device until it's been stored remotely? Temporary until the NN is trained?
The cat's out of the bag, anyway. They already have a perfect dataset and surveillance mechanism. But it'd be nice to stop continuing to perfect it.
It says, "If you use TSA PreCheck Touchless ID, your information is deleted within 24 hours of your scheduled departure time."
Yes, they could be lying. That would be illegal.
What does the very next sentence say?
Agreed. Provides no obvious benefit to either me or society at large. Normalizes collection of biometrics. Implementation details not easy to verify - they could be lying or could silently change things later.
The entire scheme has a very high abuse potential. Equipment and personnel set up at major ports and their presence normalized. Turnkey authoritarianism at its finest.
I just flew from the US to Europe; at each point where I had to get my picture taken, the machine had a label on it that clearly said they would delete my data after 24 hours. (Or after use, I don't remember the precise time frame.)
Were they lying? Possibly. But this is not a matter of them trying to use weasel wording to trick you into thinking they're claiming something they're not.
You think they could be lying, but your argument is that they're being candid? Then we simply see it differently. I just read the primary source, so I know without a doubt that it's weasely.
Moreover, it was put forward as proof that they don't keep the data, but the source is actually called "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos) collected." What are they protecting if they don't have it? What would be the point of even doing this if they don't collect it?
But leave that aside and let's talk about your experience. Did it say the data would be deleted after 24 hours or did it say it would be deleted after use? What is use? Use could be we're operating a giant biometric database and we intend to keep doing it until the asteroid, and why wouldn't it be that?
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that if they are lying, they are doing so flat-out, not by using weasel words—because the wording they used at the point of disservice was very clear that they would be deleting them, not just "we will protect your data."
I'm not attempting to defend the TSA; I think they're reprehensible. I wish merely to provide new facts into the discussion.
Humans forget. The TSA allegedly deletes your photo, but they're quiet about the rest of the data they collected from that photo.
Make sure to opt-out before handing your ID over to the agent. They will claim you can no longer opt-out at that point, even before scanning. I had one plead to my wife to go through, because they are being watched by management and it wouldn't look good.
I always say I'm opting out as loudly as possible, many people don't even know that you can opt-out. The signs are often small and out sight.
What really annoys me is when I politely decline the facial scan of TSA, and the agent makes some snide comment about my picture on my identification or something. And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I'm pretty sure they're told some things to say. I overheard one telling someone the line about how it doesn't matter because there's cameras everywhere so you shouldn't opt out. Bizarrely, the agents seemed to be checking IDs manually that day!
>And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I get the temptation to do this, I really do, but I really don't recommend this. The TSA is in a position to make your day much worse. It's better just to opt-out and say nothing. Opting out is well within your rights (it's posted on the sign at the start of the line).
Follow instructions. Keep your mouth shut. Eyes forward. On your way.
OTOH, if that person can afford it by not belonging to a vulnerable group, they should be the one to be a bit of a pain in the ass in the face of intrusive practices.
> Ask Wegmans directly to exclude you from facial recognition - Send an email to their privacy team
The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.
Kinda funny.
Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.
I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"
They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.
I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!
The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.
Good write up. Still I gotta say: a N95 mask will do the trick for cheap, with side bonus of also blocking flu & covid!
There are cameras (software, really) that can recognize you with a high degree of accuracy, despite you wearing a mask.
The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.
Well you could stand outside and hand out N95 masks to spread awareness. That isn’t doing nothing to fix the issue.
Why wouldn't they just do gait analysis?
Some places that would do face recognition would not do gait analysis, and so you defeat those. Additionally, if you prevent them from doing face recognition and they can do gait recognition, they will be forced to use gait recognition, which is likely more expensive or less reliable, which will limit their ability to do it in a widespread fashion or cost them more to do so.
Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.
Shoe stone.
Or a tack - in case Wegmans tries to pull a polygraph on you.
It’s unreliable and difficult. The most recent failure (made the news) was the laughable attempt to link the J6 bomber to a random police officer. Gait analysis belongs in the movies or maybe in some one-off national security investigation where nothing else is available.
prohibitively expensive
I don't know your financial situation but a N95 mask can't cost you more than 10$? I can find 10 packs for less than 10$. You can even reuse your shopping mask since you primary point is privacy and not air borne pathogens.
You can still reuse N95s for airborne pathogens as long as they fit well, but I believe that user was referring to gait analysis being too expensive.
Because that isn’t a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Surveillance
It may not be an issue for you at the moment, but outright dismissal will not keep you safe.
I work in this space and have for quite a while. There is no productized gait analysis software available to the commercial markets.
Surely archived footage would be ripe for automated analysis once the tools are commercialized.
Yes, in the same way stored passwords of today may eventually be broken by the quantum computing tools of tomorrow.
The post I replied to implied that gait analysis is a viable alternative option. Gait analysis is not an option today, or this year, or even in the next decade. There is no data supporting the claim that it can be done reliably enough to get down to practical reidentification use cases.
I don't see how you can enforce no face scanning if you allow security cameras.
Make it illegal. Give rewards for anonymous tips that lead to prosecution like it already exists for IRS tax fraud tips.
Americans will try anything to stop corporate wrongdoing--except making it illegal.
American's do not have the power to make things illegal. We have a representative democracy. Why it fails to represent the will of the people has been a good debate for the past 30 years.
We frequently won't even suggest it, at least on HN. Its always derided by "how will it be enforced? There are ways to evade it!". Always letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Americans will try anything to stop shoplifting--except enforcing it.
That’s just not possible because it’s unenforceable at best and ignores the myriad ways around it “legally” that still would be workable even if it’s “illegal”
For example it’s illegal to hire foreign undocumented labor but in literally zero of the companies who have been raided recently the only people punished were the working people who are just trying to live
Allow enforcement by awarding whistleblower bounties via civil courts. Give standing for civil suits to be brought forth a la Texas' bounty laws if regulators won't enforce the law.
All that does is create a new middle layer of auditors who are de facto government stooges in contractor outfits
They take your money so that you can be compliant with the Kafkaesque language of the law, such that you can continue to do what you wanna do, but now you’re actually protected under the law with a specific proviso through this new middleman.
And so that’s when you get industry groups lobby in Congress to say we need to do this without the other at the federal level.
There’s no way you’re gonna be able to actually figure this out because laws don’t work to protect citizens, laws are intended to protect business interests. Like that is unambiguous and undisputed at this point.
Surveillance consumerism IS the economy
I’m sure the current authoritarian government will get right on that.
A man can dream
We haven't even tried to solve this any other way.
Pitting people against each other should be a last, last, last, resort.
Low trust is VERY expensive. It's asinine to introduce it to anywhere it doesn't already exist.
We have in other domains, there's a reason whistleblower protections and rewards exist.
There needs to be protections and incentives for, for example, low level employees to report their employers when they're privy to them breaking the law.
I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
>I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
I agree. I'm not sure making the employer-employee relationship worse to prevent it actually makes it better though. Every retail company is doing some amount of security stuff that's adjacent to this even if they're being tasteful.
Can we try "just" making it like normal levels of illegal before we make the employer-employee relationship dynamic worse in any workplace where data that could be used in this way is at all relevant?
Implementing workers' rights and protections for whistleblowers improves the employer-employee relationship by protecting honest employees from retaliation from employers who are already intent on violating the law.
Criminality is a breach of trust.
>Criminality is a breach of trust.
I dare you to explain how without using a) an example where in the absence of law trust would not also be breached b) claiming the tipster's trust is breached because they inherit that breach through the N levels of government above them until you get to a level that both the narc and the IRS inherit from c) making some assertion that would create either insanity or hilarity if used to reason about other mundane illegality (e.g bringing some personal weed through a non legal state).
Also the cash under the table workforce is alive and well wheras the mail order drugs industry goes through great pains to structure itself and engage in opsec such that trust is not needed. That would seem to indicated that tax evasion is not inherently a breach of trust.
I'm confused now, are you talking about shoplifting?
If we define face scanning as specifically doing facial-recognition over multiple cameras, stores and/or time, then it's quite clear and simple.
A store could easily have security cameras operating without issue. They don't need to do any more smarts on it.
It's where you draw the line on smarts that's the thing.
- Person-shaped-object crossed from public-area to private area (eg through a staff-only door) without a corresponding door swipe event.
- Person-shaped-object appears to take an object off a shelf and put it in their bag/pocket.
- Specifically tracking a person over multiple cameras in one visit as they navigate the store, without associating with an identity
- Using facial recognition to recognise the same person over multiple visits/stores, and being able to track their activity over all of those visits.
There could be arguments for some of these being permitted without it being a total invasion of privacy.
I agree but unless the industry is forced they are not implementing this in a privacy friendly way. They rather collect as much data as possible.
Business Reform on YouTube has some tests and reviews of this kind of gear.
https://www.youtube.com/@businessreform/videos
I think we're far past the point where you can avoid being tracked anywhere in the world, and that's even if you wear sunglasses, a hat, and you use no technology (no phone, etc).
Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".
If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.
Maybe, but they're also incentivized to make people believe they are doing more than they are, and with higher accuracy, because it makes people give up entirely and make no effort to protect their privacy.
"Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue"
The irony of being fingerprinted to read a blog about fingerprinting is apparently lost on Adafruit.
you're seeing a script block from cloudflare’s bot protection. we’re actively working to reduce third-party surveillance on our systems, including evaluating less invasive alternatives to aggressive bot mitigation.
if you’ve got ideas or want to help us test better solutions, we’re totally open — reach out.
and what's that? oh right! we’re one of the few sites that still respects do not track — and always have.
full text is available via rss (no js, no cookies): https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
I saw Adafruit and was anticipating a clever gadget announcement. Suppose some problems still need to solved the old fashioned way.
Low tech means accessible. A cowboy hat works better.
How do I get Kroger to not scan my face? All these grocer companies are doing this same market analysis seemingly without giving good faith notice. I guess they are not legally required to inform their targets. It seems there needs to be some improvement in consumer protection laws. Dunnhumby and 84.51° are thick into this "taking".
so even if you don't have your face scanned on the register, unless you're paying cash they'd still know who you are right? don't most people have passports? real ID is also a thing. if you're concerned about a hostile government wearing a mask at a grocery store isn't going to do anything sadly. not even counting things like gait analysis, security cameras or tracking your phone
Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).
personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.
- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do
https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-accuses-amazon-secretl...
> law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict,
Or, amazing life hack, don’t do crimes, on video or otherwise.
Not saying there are no privacy concerns, but I WANT this used in court against criminals
Do you agree that all current laws are just and correct, and are you confident that nobody will ever come into power who wants to make illegal something you believe is just and right to do?
I don't disagree, but I don't think private companies should be able to both keep videos indefinitely and for those videos to be accessible to the government for arbitrary goals.
I do pay cash. I don't have a passport. You can opt out of Real ID.
Anyways, the solution, as always, is noise. They leave their data pipelines open and assume all the data is mostly clean. There needs to be a massive technological development for the population to just clog those channels with so much noise they become effectively useless.
DDoS of the surveillance state.
Why does anyone need to opt out at all?
You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?
Getting punched in the face vs. walking into a private store that has a type of surveillance you disagree with are entirely different things...
These are not private stores. They are open to the public. This comes with several other requirements that a truly "private store" would not have to follow. There is a massive body of law which defines this.
"Being open to the public" doesn't mean they cannot use surveillance. They also have the right to ask you to leave, enforce clothing standards, etc. It's a private business - and a private building. They have a lot of rights about what happens within the premises.
If you disagree, you can choose to shop somewhere else. It's literally that simple.
Even if the law didn’t, humans have a basic right to privacy and anonymity from for-profit entities when completing life essential tasks. We’ve just become so cooked that it’s not even considered a problem for most, and not mandated by law to the extent that it should be.
Mostly to make life a bit more annoying for the stores that try to implement this sort of thing- raising the cost to implement it.
This!
I fear people will just get used to it just like other means of mass surveillance then wonder why they're being harassed with petty pretexts based on this data.
This is already the case. The largest supermarket chain in my relatively wealthy area has had multiple cameras per aisle hanging about ~3 feet above your head + monitors in each aisle that show some, but not all, camera views, for over a decade now.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
> I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
They literally have nothing better to do so this, traffic enforcement and bothering kids who are trying to have a good time are the bulk of their duty, so I'd agree.
> It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I think a certain kind of person is comforted by surveillance. They perceive it, usually somewhat correctly from places of immense privilege, to be for their benefit and protection. They idea that it would be used against them, who are Good, and not against those people, who are Bad, is laughable to them if the concept even crosses their minds.
Maybe you're one of those people if the cameras bother you, is the sentiment.
What I was getting at is that these richer areas are pretty bimodal. They either support the shit out of the police or they think that enforcing petty theft laws are racist and both cases lead to more orwellian crap (the latter because the retailer has to basically serve up felony prosecutions on a silver platter if they want anything to happen).
Harassed how?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-face...
This is one of the side effects of the shoplifting trends in recent years.
I don't think there is any alternative to this. I assume every corporation is filming me in their stores, building shopper profiles, that granularly identify me in every conceivable way. I am not surprised at all that Wegmans is taking a picture of my face. It's good to know, it's good for this to be in the news, but I can't imagine any grocery store, not taking advantage of video surveillance, profiling, all of that stuff if it will help them sell more.
FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
This is defeatist. You imply that local retailers are in on this as well, I know for a fact that my local co-op is not. Neither is the local farm stand or the local salvage grocery store. If you aren’t in a huge metro, shop local and you’ll do fine.
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
I want people to finally get mad enough that they do something about it instead of sitting here with half ass solutions and just bitching about it.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
Didn’t expect a reply, so thanks for replying. Getting people active may be your intent, but it comes off like a demoralization campaign. I don’t know who is involved in it or why (although I can guess), but there is a lot of intentional demoralization in these surveillance and privacy threads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)
If you really want people to fight, it’s better to use fighting words, to cheer on allies who are fighting, or to give examples of how you have successfully fought back. This also counters attempts at demoralization.
Comfortable people don’t start, maintain or complete revolutions.
Shit’s gonna have to get really really bad really really quickly for anybody to actually seriously mobilize against the reality of the insanity that you live inside.
It’s just so fundamentally corrupt and broken at every possible level
Anyone suggesting that we need some kind of relatively small skin procedure when the patient has stage four skin cancer is still living in a dream world
There is a difference between agitation and demoralization. Demoralization often has the opposite of the intended effect. People shut down and stop resisting, they defect to the other team, they abuse substances or in extreme cases they self-harm, all because they are convinced that resistance is impossible. None of this advances your revolutionary goals. Demoralization is collaboration with the enemy.
I reject this concept that there’s some kind of intentional demoralization happening here
If people feel demoralized it’s because they can’t generate the rage necessary to turn information into physical action
If someone is overwhelmed by it then that is a indictment that should give people pause and ask “why is my response to fear to freeze fawn or flight instead of fight”
Ultimately if the plurality of humans roll over and die when encountered with overwhelming force, then so be it and that’s the result, and they will go the way of Neanderthal
If people are not enraged then they are being intentionally ignorant and ultimately theres nothing to save
Your very competent opponents have studied this problem and found that people can be manipulated through careful application of psychological warfare techniques.
Ultimately your position boils down to “I would rather lose than alter my tactics because humans don’t behave as I’d like them to.” Your opponents will happily oblige you.
I think you seem to be missing the point that the citizenry is the problem
To quote carlin: The public sucks
If the citizen is so devoid of capabilities that it can be manipulated into killing itself then the citizen does not have what it takes to survive
You claim that you’re trying to wake people up. I think you should be more honest with yourself. You’re mocking the people for their own failures as they go under.
I’m not a screen so stop projecting
My hope is that people wake up but I do not have any confidence that that is actually going to happen, as I stated
You use the word “mocking” but it’s inappropriate here - a better word to use would be “challenging” or “agitating.”
Ultimately if my life is surrounded by a bunch of robots who can do all the things that are necessary in order to move the epistemological foundations of reality forward that’s more than I could say for any collection of humans.
After over 40 years of experience as a human I can tell you definitively the humans are the number one problem in the world.
Well I guess we have the same hopes and frustrations, the difference is that I try to encourage people who are aligned with me. Motivated people with encouragement and a positive mindset can accomplish much. Demotivated people retreat to their homes and wither away.
Right now the demotivators are winning.
I think the reaction to COVID in which we not only haven't improved our behavior regarding the problem of infectious disease but have regressed even further has shown that accelerationism is not a viable strategy for dealing with long-term problems whose effects are often not immediately and directly visible and which require inconvenience to solve.
Well we know that education didn’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that command economies don’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that formal hierarchies don’t work so that’s not a solution
Have any solutions?
Humans can only really coherently plan at the global scale required on the order of months into the future
However our activities, even at the individual level (burning a tire for example) have extreme impacts and costs on extant populations globally and future populations.
It’s like we completely stopped talking about climate change and how the ecological collapse is about to punch everybody in the throat.
This is a mathematical formula that does not have a solution
The only possible solution is to change the properties of the atomic unit which is individual human actor
Since we cannot change the foundational biology of humanity then there is a impossible to solve problem here if there is a desire to retain the human element in the future. I stopped desiring a human future about 30 years ago because it makes no sense.
The biological limitations of the human species is now the single weakest link of all possible futures.
That was not true before (insert your preferred period, upper paleolithic, neolithic, industrial revolution etc…) but has only been accelerating since.
Unless some absolutely foundational things change, like the foundational functioning of human systems, then we will continue this cycle of destruction forever.
They always show me my total before the cars swipe, so as long as the obfuscation works until the card swipe, at least it would prevent dynamic pricing.
Dynamic pricing can’t be done legally in many states because prices on shelves have to match at checkout, and multiple people can see a label at once.
I mean that assumes that you can’t assign the highest price to non-facially recognized people.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
The prices are posted on the shelves… do you think they change the price when you scan it at the register?
The shelves have digital tags now…
Then, unless you use a different card each time you go
Or use one of the pool phone numbers. NPA-867-5309 is a common one.
What is the NPA for?
I meant bank card
Jenny left her number in your neighborhood too?
I largely thought this wouldn’t work, but having tried it at several grocery store chains while traveling with a 100% success rate so far I’m not complaining. (Nothing worse then being told you can’t sign up because customer service is closed, and you have to sign up to get the pricing, and there’s no generic store card they can scan as a curtesy ).
- this has worked for me in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
I'll share this here now that I only drive EVs, but I suppose cashiers and random people at King Soopers(major grocer in Colorado, associated with Kroger's) would enter 555-555-5555 as their phone number for their rewards, and every time I would pump gas at their stations I would get $1/gallon off.
That number also works at Walgreens (at least in Arizona and New York).
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
> Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
The problem is not if a bank can track individual legal tender and associate it with an account holder, but instead if a company which is not a bank (such as a grocery store) could determine same.
In other words, how would a merchant be able to establish a specific $20 USD bill was used by a specific person?
No bank would share this information with an entity other than law enforcement and likely would require a court ordered subpoena to do so.
We need a startup to make those super realistic face masks easy to make and use. Celebrities could license their faces to make up for movies and tv being AI generated.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
> I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
How does surveillance prevalent with online delivery services substantially differ from biometric ones?
> In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
This just doesn't make sense.
Are you asserting that people going into grocery stores now are more likely to commit theft due to those using online delivery services no longer engaging in on-premise shopping?
Or is it your premise that people who typically use online delivery services only go into grocery stores to steal?
Are you suggesting that a shift to online shopping led to a new demographic going to grocery stores in person? I would have expected that demographic would have went to grocery stores all along. What has changed that introduced a new demographic? And why does it mean security has to change?
Overall foot traffic is down in stores. People who shop online don't go to the store as often, and when they do they expect a worthwhile experience and to probably spend more. They're going to the grocery stores with the craft beer on tap, proper restaurants, etc. They know their online shopping is already monitored and cashless, so it's only a minor annoyance to see that in person. Not many are going to walk away just because of that. Those nicer stores are also in the wealthier neighborhoods where the expectation is safety while they spend extra time with the shiny new amenities in a smaller more peaceful crowd.
The people who avoid online and delivery may not have a choice and are more price sensitive or likely to shoplift, so those other stores also have to increase security.
I'm saying that people have become segregated. The suburbanite middle and upper classes don't "stop by on the way home from work" anymore and they aren't leaving home just to shop unless it's worth the hassle. They expect much higher levels of convenience and safety than ever before. Increased security everywhere makes sense.