Hi, I work as a consultant around AI, and I want everyone here to know: every company with a brick-and-mortar wants to do this. The barriers are (1) tech stack, (2) use case, and (3) ethics, in that order.
It's not just facial recognition in stores: it's tying face, license plate, credit card, and phone app into a single customer view; it's pricing based on your past (and current!) behavior; and it's data consortiums to tie together data across companies (ever wonder why everyone asks for your phone #? It's traditionally the primary key in the big-*ss joins).
The expectation of privacy we have online is coming to the real world, make no mistake. I wish I had a call to action here but... keep yelling, I guess? I don't have a solution.
If your real name is discernible from your HN profile, and you own a car, I could likely get your license plate. If you live in a big city, I could search your license plate and find locations where you were. Alternatively, I could find your address, then search for license plates that drove near your house. It's not a perfect system but it has millions of records. And there must be other correlated databases that I don't know about.
The only things we can do is use fake/different numbers at stores, use prepaid or business debit cards and have burner iPhones and rooted Androids. Register your license plate in corporations names, and don't put your utilities in your real name. If we just decorrelate the data, and falsify it, then we could have a chance.
It is registered in almost all systems already and you'll get the discounts. They get nothing (except the knowledge that apparently Jenny buys everything). Plus, nowadays most people working at checkout don't even know the significance of that number and don't bat an eye when you give it
The USA really needs a new amendment to protect people from digital surveillance both from governments and corporations (businesses). In olden times there was a limit with mobility and technology. That is no longer the case. A similar motion in the United Nations would also be useful but with Russia and China 2 of the 5 members of the SC I don't see that ever happening.
Now that facemasks are normalized in the American public, surely this tech is pretty inert now? I imagine people will start wearing their masks for any cold or flu, not just COVID, like other countries have been doing for years. Any would be shoplift is now socially allowed to conceal their face at all times.
And if you weren’t a shop lift, it sounds like taking public transit, walking, or biking, and paying with cash will be king for the privacy conscious. At least this will force a few people into better mobility habits.
Shop at local businesses as much as possible. In my area, this is somewhat viable. I'm not holding my breath on much of the populace actually doing this though. If we haven't boycotted Walmart by now, we're not ever going to.
I assumed that they'd just link it up with credit cards even if I refuse to give my phone number. Or, maybe they'll invent some common encrypted face fingerprint with which they can identify customers across companies.
May I ask what you mean when you list the use case as a barrier? Just that they know they could do something, but exactly what to do and how to finish it is the hard part?
I understand the vision for this technology involves marketing information, but this article is mostly about security and protection against theft. If it is useful for that alone, that would make it an invaluable tool. The regulations to protect consumer privacy should be careful to keep that distinction in mind. We all pay the costs of theft.
I mean, I carry my phone around in my pocket, so I kinda expect at least big Google is watching me. And probably the cell network. And probably the government, passively.
But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy? I mean: the customer is typically just buying whatever their doctor prescribes them. I guess they have aisles of cosmetics and cold medicine and stuff, but still, this seems remarkable for its banality and at the same time invasiveness. It's the worst kind of evil: stupid evil.
I mean, one thing we all can certainly be doing is making a concerted effort to shop more at our local independent businesses. Plus, this comes with the added benefit that it keeps money circulating in our communities for longer!
At the end of the day, I can rest easy knowing that all of this is to shove products in my face that I still don’t want or have any use for.
All of the analytics of the internet, all of this data collection and machine learning - all to show my a picture of a $69 leather jacket. Or a Muse headband. Or a Peloton bike.
I’m not a consumer, these tricks don’t work on me.
I always wonder if they really get much value out of all this surveillance or if they just hope to get value.
It seems that a lot of companies are these days are trying to hack their customers instead of treating them right. In the long run I don't this will work. I already am getting a very bad taste dealing with a lot of companies because they seem to view me, the customer, as something to extract money from instead of a customer to be respected. You notice that for example with a lot of search results where the company places stuff they want to sell in the results instead of allowing me to search for what I need.
Either we are going into a very dark future or there will be massive pushback. Not sure which way it will go.
Even companies like Google seem incapable of using all the information they gather in a very helpful way.
There are some small ml cases that seem to work ok, like suggestions for message responses.
But YouTube video suggestions for example seem so facile. If I click a few videos about today's news, then every video suggestion quickly becomes similar content. Even though I am subscribed to a dozen niche channels and may have watched a bunch of science and engineering videos, I don't get any suggestions related to that unless I directly seek them out. After which, all my suggestions turn to engineering videos.
Didnt Orbitz (or one of the travel sites) get caught charging customers more money per ticket if they were on a Macbook vs any other computer? [1] This type of data collection is the start of individual pricing based on what stores believe you will pay.
> It seems that a lot of companies are these days are trying to hack their customers instead of treating them right.
This is true, and frankly really well put. But I think it has its limits. Rite Aid and similar stores have an extremely tenuous "relationship" with their customers already. The pharmacy in the back might, but the overwhelming bulk of their revenue comes from the snacks and sundries they sell to people walking by, and frankly those people don't care any more about the store than it does about them.
I mean, it's cynical, but there's social value in having Just Another Faceless Junk Store on every corner. We don't want to be "treated right" as an independent variable, we want the drink cooler and sunscreen to be trivially available and we'll walk into whatever door we see.
In that world, "hacking your customers" is the only feasible path to growth. I share the upthread concern as to whether this is effective, I just don't see a way for these stores to avoid going down that path if it does work.
Technologies with similar capabilities are being rolled out en masse throughout retailers across America. I've worked with a regional grocer supporting one of these projects. There are turnkey systems from several vendors, but the general concept is similar. Cameras have full coverage of the retail floorspace from multiple angles. The systems can track an individual throughout the store, and they can observe someone pulling items off the shelf.
This is used for a couple things. One, if customer pulls product A off the shelf instead of product B right next to it, the manufacturer of product B can purchase the ability to have their coupon print out at checkout to be handed to somebody who is proven to have an interest in the category. Alternately, it can be used with self-checkout systems to confirm that the shopper actually scanned product A, or to alert security to check the shopper's receipt and cart at exit.
Amazon is offering this sort of technology for checkout-less stores, but similar offerings for loss-prevention and targeted marketing are online and available.
It would be trivial to add face recognition to this stack, and I strongly suspect it is in fact offered if you ask for it. The use case there would be focused around the loss prevention aspect, and that's a huge financial driver for implementing these systems.
Another interesting feature of this market is that the websites for the products themselves don't really advertise the full functionality of the product. You won't see the scale of the offering until you get to the in-person sales demo and slide decks. It feels like the vendors know how the technology could be perceived.
> One, if customer pulls product A off the shelf instead of product B right next to it, the manufacturer of product B can purchase the ability to have their coupon print out at checkout to be handed to somebody who is proven to have an interest in the category.
What does that add over simply printing a Product B coupon whenever someone purchases Product A?
Why would you need facial recognition to print a coupon? If the system knows that product A is next to product B, then it can just print B's coupon whenever A is scanned at checkout.
This sort of thing is a little perverse imo. I don’t think anyone should be punished for stealing food, that’s a crime of hopeless poverty. My roomates were broke in college, spending nearly all money on rent and school. If someone wanted meat that week, they would ring up the chuck as bananas at self checkout. Otherwise it was rice and beans.
Adding to the above, the general goal is to create a physical "heat map" similar to what is used in web eCommerce sites. Fact of the matter, retail is split between a dual role of providing physical locations as well as web locations where they sell their products and services. Because it is easier to base decisions on similar evaluations, the convenience of eCommerce "heat maps" is driving companies to try to create the same for their physical locations. Then all the methods used for surveillance capitalism used online can be applied to their physical retail operations.
Why do people focus so much on how the data can potentially go back to China? It just feels like a redirection to distract us from the privacy violations here in the US. I understand why it's a concern but it just seems like every article always ends up talking mostly about Chinese companies, the Chinese government, how they respond to accusations etc. instead of focusing on our government, our corporations, our security forces all using or wanting to use technology like this.
Take the "Orwellian surveillance" part. We get about 2 paragraphs about how surveillance in the US is largely unregulated and whatnot and then 4 of them about China. The other sections afterwards seem like they were written to almost justify the use of surveillance in US corporations.
Maybe it's all in my head but it's just something I keep noticing whenever there's writing about surveillance in the US.
For the same reason news coverage of things that are bad for everyone focus on how it's bad for black people, or how it's bad for women. Because the press seem categorically incapable of covering negative aspects of society without a uniquely-victimized or uniquely-malicious group involved.
The conventional wisdom is that they need an angle to make readers care. My hot take is that they're too fucking thick to even begin making an intelligent analysis of anything but the most black-and-white topics. If something is actually contentious they just report on a handful of fashionable opinions as co-equal, trashtalk the low-status opinions, and don't even bother acknowledging the principals and/or perceived realities that lead people to various opinions.
Because it's a national security threat. The real danger of a surveillance state is political/foreign actors using that information to gain advantage. It's one thing for individual's shopping habits to be exposed, it's another thing for the person's information to be used by bad actors for their own purposes.
> U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and acting chair of the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee, told Reuters in a statement that the Rite Aid system’s potential link to China was “outrageous.” “The Chinese Communist Party’s buildup of its Orwellian surveillance state is alarming, and China’s efforts to export its surveillance state to collect data in America would be an unacceptable, serious threat,” he said.
Paragraph works just as well after s/China/America/g.
I genuinely don't understand what the big deal is. Brick and mortar stores lose a lot lose of money in theft. Walmart alone loses $3 billion each each year. It's their private space, so it makes sense that they want to know who's going inside. The majority of shoppers are using their credit card and store rewards card anyways, so they already know who most of the paying customers are anyways.
There was a company called "stop lift" that deployed cameras on its check out lines. Looking for fraud by employees and probably self checkout.
Whenever I'm in a store at the cashiers I look up and often see lots of camera domes above the register.
I wonder if it’s inevitable that we will get denial of entry based facial recognition systems. It’s legally difficult to stop people from leaving the store whereas it’ll be much easier to prevent them from entering.
If someone shoplifts then they get banned from the chain, or a network of chains. This would be an alternative to police involvement. Restitution could be done proportionality and privately.
Of course there will be issues with it but I’m sure it could be cheaper to figure this out than the alternative loss prevention solutions.
A few years back I stayed at the Nugget in downtown vegas. I hate vegas but friends wanted to watch the sweet 16 there. I was actaully somewhat happy with the nugget, it was freshly upgraded and pretty nice. Food was ok and ok priced, and the vegas main street is a better feel for me than the mega hotels.
My friends paid, I paid cash, I skipped checkin and went right to the room.
What flipped was my friend walked up to a blackjack table and the dealer greeted him by name. Another friend who had also checked in was greeted by the cash out teller by name. They didn't seem to know who I was.
I started paying for everything in cash and was like "welp, guess I'm definitely never coming back to vegas"
"the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government."
And today along with countless millions of North Americans I dialed my mom on a piece of technology that was made in China and its authoritarian Government (TM). FFS can't they stop shoving big bad China into every story. However bad it is not China's fault for US corporation being A-hole.
Added for clarification: This is not to protect China, rather to point out this style of "reporting" that lately seems to have very little to do with the true reporting as it used to be.
After IBM, Microsoft and many others publicly declared (for marketing reasons no doubt) to stop working and delivering face recognition systems, a new competitor quickly fills the space. Color me surprised.
Yes expected. I posted before that by trying to stop companies we work for or other well known companies from operating in this space we give up far too much opportunity to police and possibly influence the outcome.
Facial Recognition is coming along with all other sorts of identification. They key to making sure these are not abuse is to get embedded into the process of making them. This way issues of privacy, accuracy, and accountability, can all be addressed.
Currently far too many here, especially here, are the head in sand type. If they shout it down and declare it evil and see a big name step down they declare it fixed. Ignoring the fact the world is a big place and other companies and countries really don't care what your opinion is. So get in there and make sure where you live that this technology when it does become common place has the structures in place to protect the individual.
Because you can damn well guarantee it won't be corporations abusing it, it will be politically oriented groups who will exploit it. You think the cancel culture is bad now with their name and shame combined with using sycophants to leak records if not outright court challenges to sealed records, wait till they abuse this
I think I have to agree with some comments that it's very unlikely companies do get a lot of value from these surveillance programmes. From a side, it all sounds super advanced and promising,but in the reality it's usually more down to earth:
After buying a dehumidifier from Amazon, they keep sending emails with various dehumidifier options.. Like I need 20 of them. Sainsbury's tracks my shopping via Nectar card just to give me 5p discount on the cucumbers and crisps I sometimes buy. Where's all the sophistication? With all the tracking and analytics, one would think they could better track shopper sentiment,yet thousands of tons of unsold food and other products get dumped every day.
Also,just because someone is doing it, that doesn't mean it's profitable. A lot of CEOs get sold all this AI/ML hype and because they have genuine fears of being left out, they just roll with it.
Doesn't seem like a productive battle. It's only upsides for stores that roll out facial recognition. If you want this stopped you will need legislation.
Sounds to me like someone sold Rite Aid a sow's purse, and is no wonder for a chain that had to go begging to its competitors to bail it out of insolvency. (They attempted then failed to merge with CVS and settled for giving more than half of their stores to Walgreens.)
[+] [-] curiousllama|5 years ago|reply
It's not just facial recognition in stores: it's tying face, license plate, credit card, and phone app into a single customer view; it's pricing based on your past (and current!) behavior; and it's data consortiums to tie together data across companies (ever wonder why everyone asks for your phone #? It's traditionally the primary key in the big-*ss joins).
The expectation of privacy we have online is coming to the real world, make no mistake. I wish I had a call to action here but... keep yelling, I guess? I don't have a solution.
[+] [-] seebetter|5 years ago|reply
The only things we can do is use fake/different numbers at stores, use prepaid or business debit cards and have burner iPhones and rooted Androids. Register your license plate in corporations names, and don't put your utilities in your real name. If we just decorrelate the data, and falsify it, then we could have a chance.
[+] [-] dmitrygr|5 years ago|reply
It is registered in almost all systems already and you'll get the discounts. They get nothing (except the knowledge that apparently Jenny buys everything). Plus, nowadays most people working at checkout don't even know the significance of that number and don't bat an eye when you give it
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wasdfff|5 years ago|reply
And if you weren’t a shop lift, it sounds like taking public transit, walking, or biking, and paying with cash will be king for the privacy conscious. At least this will force a few people into better mobility habits.
[+] [-] goatinaboat|5 years ago|reply
How will that work in a brick-and-mortar store where there is a price label on everything?
[+] [-] curiousllama|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potta_coffee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbecker|5 years ago|reply
One solution could be to legislate uniform pricing. Would at least take away the incentive in many cases.
[+] [-] starkd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grugagag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] normalnorm|5 years ago|reply
This sounds like a line that some good writer trying to make fun of silicon valley would come up with. If that's the case, good job!
[+] [-] dilandau|5 years ago|reply
I mean, I carry my phone around in my pocket, so I kinda expect at least big Google is watching me. And probably the cell network. And probably the government, passively.
But RITE AID? What the hell, a fucking pharmacy? I mean: the customer is typically just buying whatever their doctor prescribes them. I guess they have aisles of cosmetics and cold medicine and stuff, but still, this seems remarkable for its banality and at the same time invasiveness. It's the worst kind of evil: stupid evil.
[+] [-] _bohm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|5 years ago|reply
All of the analytics of the internet, all of this data collection and machine learning - all to show my a picture of a $69 leather jacket. Or a Muse headband. Or a Peloton bike.
I’m not a consumer, these tricks don’t work on me.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
It seems that a lot of companies are these days are trying to hack their customers instead of treating them right. In the long run I don't this will work. I already am getting a very bad taste dealing with a lot of companies because they seem to view me, the customer, as something to extract money from instead of a customer to be respected. You notice that for example with a lot of search results where the company places stuff they want to sell in the results instead of allowing me to search for what I need.
Either we are going into a very dark future or there will be massive pushback. Not sure which way it will go.
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
There are some small ml cases that seem to work ok, like suggestions for message responses.
But YouTube video suggestions for example seem so facile. If I click a few videos about today's news, then every video suggestion quickly becomes similar content. Even though I am subscribed to a dozen niche channels and may have watched a bunch of science and engineering videos, I don't get any suggestions related to that unless I directly seek them out. After which, all my suggestions turn to engineering videos.
[+] [-] ProAm|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mac-users-pay-more-than-pc-users-s...
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
This is true, and frankly really well put. But I think it has its limits. Rite Aid and similar stores have an extremely tenuous "relationship" with their customers already. The pharmacy in the back might, but the overwhelming bulk of their revenue comes from the snacks and sundries they sell to people walking by, and frankly those people don't care any more about the store than it does about them.
I mean, it's cynical, but there's social value in having Just Another Faceless Junk Store on every corner. We don't want to be "treated right" as an independent variable, we want the drink cooler and sunscreen to be trivially available and we'll walk into whatever door we see.
In that world, "hacking your customers" is the only feasible path to growth. I share the upthread concern as to whether this is effective, I just don't see a way for these stores to avoid going down that path if it does work.
[+] [-] take_a_breath|5 years ago|reply
The continued investment implies that the market has spoken: Your data has value.
The largest companies in the world exist to make money and their investments exist to further that goal.
[+] [-] luma|5 years ago|reply
This is used for a couple things. One, if customer pulls product A off the shelf instead of product B right next to it, the manufacturer of product B can purchase the ability to have their coupon print out at checkout to be handed to somebody who is proven to have an interest in the category. Alternately, it can be used with self-checkout systems to confirm that the shopper actually scanned product A, or to alert security to check the shopper's receipt and cart at exit.
Amazon is offering this sort of technology for checkout-less stores, but similar offerings for loss-prevention and targeted marketing are online and available.
It would be trivial to add face recognition to this stack, and I strongly suspect it is in fact offered if you ask for it. The use case there would be focused around the loss prevention aspect, and that's a huge financial driver for implementing these systems.
Another interesting feature of this market is that the websites for the products themselves don't really advertise the full functionality of the product. You won't see the scale of the offering until you get to the in-person sales demo and slide decks. It feels like the vendors know how the technology could be perceived.
[+] [-] michaelt|5 years ago|reply
What does that add over simply printing a Product B coupon whenever someone purchases Product A?
[+] [-] JshWright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wasdfff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsenftner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaybeeayyy|5 years ago|reply
Take the "Orwellian surveillance" part. We get about 2 paragraphs about how surveillance in the US is largely unregulated and whatnot and then 4 of them about China. The other sections afterwards seem like they were written to almost justify the use of surveillance in US corporations.
Maybe it's all in my head but it's just something I keep noticing whenever there's writing about surveillance in the US.
[+] [-] finnthehuman|5 years ago|reply
The conventional wisdom is that they need an angle to make readers care. My hot take is that they're too fucking thick to even begin making an intelligent analysis of anything but the most black-and-white topics. If something is actually contentious they just report on a handful of fashionable opinions as co-equal, trashtalk the low-status opinions, and don't even bother acknowledging the principals and/or perceived realities that lead people to various opinions.
[+] [-] starkd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooljacob204|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_pwner224|5 years ago|reply
Paragraph works just as well after s/China/America/g.
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
https://www.stoplift.com/about/why-stoplift/
[+] [-] duaoebg|5 years ago|reply
If someone shoplifts then they get banned from the chain, or a network of chains. This would be an alternative to police involvement. Restitution could be done proportionality and privately.
Of course there will be issues with it but I’m sure it could be cheaper to figure this out than the alternative loss prevention solutions.
[+] [-] grogenaut|5 years ago|reply
My friends paid, I paid cash, I skipped checkin and went right to the room.
What flipped was my friend walked up to a blackjack table and the dealer greeted him by name. Another friend who had also checked in was greeted by the cash out teller by name. They didn't seem to know who I was.
I started paying for everything in cash and was like "welp, guess I'm definitely never coming back to vegas"
[+] [-] FpUser|5 years ago|reply
And today along with countless millions of North Americans I dialed my mom on a piece of technology that was made in China and its authoritarian Government (TM). FFS can't they stop shoving big bad China into every story. However bad it is not China's fault for US corporation being A-hole.
Added for clarification: This is not to protect China, rather to point out this style of "reporting" that lately seems to have very little to do with the true reporting as it used to be.
[+] [-] andialo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|5 years ago|reply
Facial Recognition is coming along with all other sorts of identification. They key to making sure these are not abuse is to get embedded into the process of making them. This way issues of privacy, accuracy, and accountability, can all be addressed.
Currently far too many here, especially here, are the head in sand type. If they shout it down and declare it evil and see a big name step down they declare it fixed. Ignoring the fact the world is a big place and other companies and countries really don't care what your opinion is. So get in there and make sure where you live that this technology when it does become common place has the structures in place to protect the individual.
Because you can damn well guarantee it won't be corporations abusing it, it will be politically oriented groups who will exploit it. You think the cancel culture is bad now with their name and shame combined with using sycophants to leak records if not outright court challenges to sealed records, wait till they abuse this
[+] [-] cosmodisk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bzb3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoopdedo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soupfordummies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnmurphy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsllc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catalogia|5 years ago|reply
Personally I've taken to wearing masks and large sunglasses, just because I can. I suppose they could still track my gait, posture, hair style, etc.
[+] [-] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomphoolery|5 years ago|reply