We're living in state of anarcho-tyranny. The state is totally unable to stop shoplifters, so companies are increasingly relying on odious technology to handle the problem themselves, which is in turn denied.
The result is we're going to all get punished for it. Increasingly we're going to see a return policy that is less and less flexible until one day it is eliminated altogether.
And a rise in membership-only retailers, like Costco. These retailers can make the use of biometrics and other shrink-prevention mechanisms a condition of membership & entry.
Memberships also give retailers a way to kick miscreants out of an entire chain (vs. trespassing them from one location) and keep them out without risking a lawsuit for profiling or other verboten activities.
If I opened a store in San Francisco tomorrow it would be some kind of membership only deal, maybe a co-op to appeal to local politics. No way would I allow the general public inside unless I were selling bulk concrete or something else equally impossible to shoplift.
In what sense are you keeping the general public out? Some percentage of any population will be shoplifters.
What makes more sense is store sized vending machines. Pay for what you want and it is dispensed. Order on site or online. I'm surprised no one is doing this on a wide scale yet.
Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]
Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.
I'd be perfectly content with this model, but the problem is then they'd have to hire employees to do things! Stores would much rather have us pick everything ourselves, checkout ourselves, and have our cars remote detonated by robots automatically if the crime computer deems it appropriate.
That way they only have to hire two employees. One to drag carts around the parking lot and one to drag keys to all the locked cabinets of soap and shampoo and diapers and whatnot.
The main issue is spiky demand, you’d have keep a cadre of employees around to minimize peak latency. Offloading tasks to the shopper scales well with usage.
People willing to pay a membership fee like Costco are probably less likely to be shoplifters, plus signing up for a membership means they have your info which further discouraged shoplifting, and then if they do catch you then it's easier to ban you from all their stores.
Shoplifters aren't going to follow any of those rules, they'll just use fake or stolen card or identities.
But I think people still do it, I don't know if they still do it but Costco would check your receipt against what was in your trolley when I shopped there, if I remember correctly (10+ years ago).
This isn't a situation that requires a social contract where they follow some rules. The ease of shoplifters "not following the rules" with fake/stolen identities will simply approach the experience of someone trying to do the same with an airline ticket.
Or... just open up big warehouses, only do online sales, and then deliver to customer?
The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.
With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?
I guess it's up for interpretation whether stealing from an Amazon van is easier or harder than stealing from a store. Is it more risky for the thief to bring the Amazon van to the hood, or the hood to the store?
Unfortunately the state will never be able to stop or prevent it. There needs to be arrests and prosecutions though, and that is where the problems start. For a interesting example, look at California. A few years back, the state reverted medium-serious crimes back to the county for detainment. This moved the cost of incarceration back to the source, however, those inmates cannot be released. So if there is an overcrowding/capacity concern, the low-level offenses such as retail theft are often immediately released even if they are a repeat habitual recidivist offender with no disincentive to offend again.
For a vision of the future, look at YouTube videos of walking tours of San Francisco and Oakland. Entire streets for lease, 38% commercial availability rate. The Crocker Mall and San Francisco Centre Mall are empty, the latter for sale, losing over $1 billion in value.
Probably doesn't matter though, because most people ditched shopping and do everything online now.
They want money and there's no reason not to do it. This isn't a matter of meeting peoples needs, most thefts are not of anything necessary. It's just a job to them.
You're saying it in sort of a condescending way, but there's still truth.
Desperation leads to crime, true.
But also true: a lack of societal norms leads to crime. Any time we advocate or demonstrate disrespect, cheating, injustice, cruelty, unwarranted rule-breaking, doxing, or any kind of mob mentality we are contributing to it.
And yes your favorite political villains are all guilty of this, but we need to start with ourselves and the people close to us.
I always wondered about framing this as a sort of self-defense position.
When I was working on a site a decade ago where people were constantly defrauding the users we built a lot of tools to creatively deal with these people to make them less effective. It became very clear that law enforcement wasn't prepared to deal with the problem (at the time at least, maybe they've gotten better) so we had to figure out anything that we could do to protect our users.
The fact that you're essentially only allowed to play defense is IMO the reason it keeps happening. If we were able to hire a cybersecuurity company to hack the people defrauding our users for us, we would have done it in a heartbeat and it would have been worth every penny. It always seemed like, in the US at least, this could have fallen under the 2nd amendment as a self defense response.
The issue, of course, with collecting biometric data to stop a problem like this is you are also collecting data from people who haven't done anything wrong at all. One false positive "anomaly" in the system, or a data breach, exposes innocent people to risk they were not informed about.
I'm not sure that I would agree with the claim that the state is unable to stop shoplifters. The case here was Australia, but speaking to the United States:
You can't really do anything about shoplifting until after it happens. It's not a crime until it's been committed, then you can prosecute. The issue is there is a base level cost to do so, and it's going to take a very large amount of shoplifting to balance that. We as a society have basically accepted that certain crimes don't go punished, and it seems like low value shoplifting largely fits that category.
In turn, large companies have decided that they will instead collect data on their own until they have enough to make it a high value issue, with proof. Then the state will prosecute. The issue here is that companies do not get to illegally collect data, they still would have to do so within the bounds of the law. So what are those bounds? We say the Government can surveil us with impunity, but only for terrorism or whatever else gets brought under that umbrella. For "petty" crimes the government would need permission to collect the amount of data that these companies are and then build their case with that.
This isn't to say that shoplifting is okay, just that society doesn't seem to care all that much. Our reaction to companies taking actions like these will also show how much we seem to care about them as well. Spoiler on that last one: we don't seem to care (in the US).
It definitely depends on the state and store policy.
A Walmart in AZ has sent gigantic bouncers after me to detain me on suspicion of shoplifting a $5 bag of cat litter. In my state they are allowed to kidnap/imprison you until police arrive if they have 'reasonable suspicion' you're in the act of shoplifting, so yeah have fun guessing whether the guy with the walmart badge is actually security or just a rapist.
OTOH there are four critera for a legal stop -- they need to see you enter without the merchandise, select it from the shelf, conceal it, then walk past the point of sale AND all merchandise. And you have to have an unobstructed view of the person, because if they discard the item you stop them for, you're in for a world of (legal) hurt.
Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.
If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.
So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.
>C. A merchant, or a merchant's agent or employee, with reasonable cause, may detain on the premises in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time any person who is suspected of shoplifting as prescribed in subsection A of this section for questioning or summoning a law enforcement officer.
i.e. all they need is reasonable cause to suspect you are shoplifting. When I was detained no one ever saw me steal anything, I openly grabbed the cat litter, scanned it at the machine, paid for it, grabbed the receipt, then refused to show it to the receipt-checker (not about to slow down for that bullshit since it is now my property) so they just sent some dudes out to grab the cart out of my hands.
I'm not pulling out a weapon unless it is the very last option, but I did not enjoy the prospect of having to mull that decision. In the end I just never shopped at that Walmart again.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that shoplifting should not be punished? Wouldn’t lack of enforcement or punishment for wrongdoing only lead to more wrongdoing? Isn’t the well-accepted viewpoint on this website that if the cost of violating a law is lower than the profit, that is what companies will do. What makes you think people won’t make the same calculation?
The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.
This entire well is completely poisoned by the bad-faith whingeing of retailers end to end.
First of all; in times long past, retailers had zero shoplifting incidents, because every order was fulfilled by their employees, who would pick from the stock room and present the customer with a ready-to-take bag of their goods, and a purchase receipt. Shoplifting in this context was basically impossible.
The advent of customers picking out their own goods let to the introduction of customers attempting to leave the store without paying, but it also saved retailers incredible amounts of money, not having to pay to have employees both stock and pull orders.
However, because nothing is ever profitable enough, much further down the line (and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows) we get self checkouts, which are basically honor boxes with speakers. And that's fine, I love self checkout and my only complaint with it is now retailers are over-reliant on it, and, again in the name of cost-cutting, have 6 to 10 registers overseen by one worker, who has to sprint between them to sort out when the stupid things can't detect a light item, or have a conniption fit when you don't place a 75" television on them, and of course they have to also make sure all of those registers are ringing up the correct items, which has itself then given rise to bag checkers at the door.
And to be clear, I'm not like, endorsing any particular system here. I don't care how stores want to convey products to me terribly, just make it clear what the fuck I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. What I am saying is retail theft is largely enabled by retailers who do nothing but chase the bottom line and constantly try and make their stores work with fewer and fewer people who are less and less skilled over time and are then SHOCKED when someone just takes something, because their ludicrously under-staffed stores are incredibly easy to steal from, if you want to.
And I would ALSO point out that throughout this long history, the cost of slippage has been built into the business, because theft is far, far from the only reason a product that is purchased wholesale may not make it all the way to a paying customer. Retail supply chains and especially grocery ones are simply AWASH in waste, and somehow, all the time, these stores make money.
So no, as a customer and taxpayer, I don't particularly give much of a shit about shoplifting.
> and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows
Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.
I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt
National larceny rates in at least the US (but I'm fairly
sure most Western countries) have consistently gone down for decades. There's significantly less shoplifting now on average than there was in the '80s or '90s.
The falling shrinkage is a good indicator, although it’s imperfect for obvious reasons. Of course, there are anomalies like COVID, but otherwise the trend is clear. Also when some entity like supermarket chains or their advocacy groups tried to split up shrinkage by its causes in the past decades, even the shoplifting part fell. So there is no better statistics, and that tells that shoplifting is probably falling.
Of course, you cannot know, but statistics is quite clear that shoplifting decrease is way more probable than increase, and you need some other reasons to advocate for increasing shoplifting. So when somebody does that, it’s highly probable that not because shoplifting is actually increasing.
As part of lobbying for changes to laws, or for more police funding - stores accurately track "shrinkage", why are you so certain it's not being reported?
Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters. If yours is not, think long and hard about your choices at the next election.
Edit: I do love the down votes. It kind of proves the point. People want to complain, but don’t want to do anything about it or hold themselves responsible for the fact that they are the ones who chose the situation they are in. Literally. At the ballot box.
If the statement that actually enforcing law will lower crime is politically motivated, then I’m afraid to ask what statement isn’t. Is it OK to state that 2+2 = 4, or does that have political undertones too?
You didn't say that "actually enforcing law will lower crime." You said "Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters." And then you tied it to voting. The initial statement is bullshit and the tie to voting makes it politically-motivated bullshit.
I've seen a shoplifter tackled to ground in AZ by loss prevention a few times. One resulted in a broken nose. I bet that person will not shoplift again. And I spent years in CA watching shoplifters walk out and store personnel saying they are NOT allowed to do anything and they were told to not call police since they do nothing and waste time. Difference? one state voted to decriminalize shoplifting below a certain amount and one did not.
The main judgement here seems to be: not everyone was there to get a refund, therefore, just entering the store is not an opt-in consent to biometric scans.
As a counter-example: Australian clubbing venues use facial recognition and id verification to identify banned individuals and detect fake documentation. This is required on condition of entry (therefore, opt-in), and this information is shared across all partner venues.
Something that you are required to do by every single venue that offers a service in order to participate is not really what I would call opt in. Yes, you can opt out by never going to a nightclub, but that seems different.
You can’t really call something opt-in if opting out means that you are barred from participating in an entire class of activity unrelated to what you opted out of.
As a counter example, the TSA in the US is now starting to use facial scans for ID, but you can opt out by telling the agent. It does not mean that you cannot go flying, it means that they use a human to identify you without the use of computerized facial scans.
I mean, the TSA already scans your passport/id, and knows every other detail about your trip. Is a facial scan really adding much more? Last time I entered the country they used facial recognition and I didn't even need to show my passport. So they obviously already had the data to recognize me from my passport photo. And this was over two years ago.
Do you really not see the difference between having to pay for a service and having to upload biometric data in a centralized database under someone else’s control?
For one, I don’t have to buy a ticket. Many theaters participate in programs where you can get a ticket as a reward for other activities (credit card points, eg). The ticket sale is determined by the theater, and is not part of a government supported scheme to prevent some people from ever seeing a movie in any theater, ever.
Finally, the sale of a ticket is necessary for the operation of many movie theaters. It is intrinsic to the business model. The nightclub could operate the service, and even work with ban lists without the centralized biometric database.
How is this the case? Presumably the scenario where they have live camera feeds and a security guard recognizes a banned person on them and removes them would be fine. Why does replacing the human with an algorithm legally make a difference? Did people consent to being facially recognized by a human security guard?
I think that it's analogous to when my genitals are fondled by a TSA agent because I opt out of body scans. The memory of the feeling of them caressing my shape lives on only in their brain instead of being permanently recorded in a database.
That's not a counter-example to the judgment reasoning you highlight: everyone entering a night club is there to enter a night club, not everyone entering a K-mart is there to get a refund.
Everyone trying to enter K-mart is trying to enter K-mart just like the night club. Everyone going into the night club is not there to drink/meet someone/dance/use the restroom/make a drug deal Just like not everyone going into K-Mart is there to shop/browse/by a snack/get a refund/steal something
nightclubs want lots of customers especially attractive women, and don't want lots of problems. What's the potential for abuse? Detecting your attractiveness or ethnicity in order to turn you away would be abuses, but is that what you are thinking of or alleging? because if it's just facial recognition, they don't have an incentive to misidentify people
This is indiscriminate data collection. Some of the risk comes from the correlation with other sources of data by LEO with overly broad access to fine grained data.
Big Brother is not watching you. Instead, thousands of Little Brothers are patiently watching their little corner of the world, recording license plates, logging phone locations, tracking credit card usage. Big Brother doesn’t need to see you, he just asks them to tell him what he wants to know.
Sounds like the tech wasn't deployed for "Refund Fraud" (it would be easier to just use facial recognition when a refund was made) but instead deployed across all stores to see what they could do with the data.
I'd be very surprised if refund fraud was the only POC that this facial recognition data was used for.
Sadly been going to HomeDepot long enough to have been there before all the cages were put up. E.g. if you want a small roll of wire, gotta find an associate to open the cage, get the wire, and walk with you to checkout to make sure you pay. I asked once if all the was necessary, and the experienced associate related some real horror stories such as folks putting a 200 ft roll of 4 guage onto a cart and simply walking out. That is impressive both in regard to the brazenness, and because someone could lift such a roll onto a cart (likely with a partner, but still).
I heard stories about how super advanced invasive surveillance let's people like Target know that you're pregnant before you actually know yourself. But I just don't buy it.
I get insane advertisements, even from places like YouTube that know me well. I get advertisements for Bumble featuring what looks like a teenage boy telling me you'll never know what you'll find on Bumble, which is weird considering I'm a married straight dude. Sometimes I even get ads in different languages.
If the most advanced ad network can't figure out the language that I speak, I'm less worried about Kmart doing some nefarious profiling based on my stride.
I like technology that targets fraud, because I like living in a high trust society. I'm annoyed that people abuse the system and that's why we can't have nice things. You could probably just target the worst 1% and basically go back to deodorants not being locked away behind glass.
> I heard stories about how super advanced invasive surveillance let's people like Target know that you're pregnant before you actually know yourself. But I just don't buy it.
I believe it. But it wasn't super-advanced surveillance. It was, as I recall, 2010's "machine learning" basically drawing inferences about purchase history to determine what sorts of personalized advertisements to mail to you or print on your receipts, or whatever.
I believe it because I worked at another large American retailer similar to Target at the time and though I was not directly involved, I was aware that other departments in our company were working on similar things. It wasn't that advanced or outlandish, it was just finding trends in the huge amount of historical purchase data we had. I can absolutely believe that it was similar at Target. People who bought these things typically bought baby-related stuff 3-6 months later, so lets send them some coupons for that baby-related stuff in 2 months. It's unlikely the fact it was baby-related was actually relevant, it probably just sent coupons for whatever the predicted purchases were.
An individuals purchase history was probably correlated either by rewards program membership (preferred) or credit cards used. If you just paid cash and didn't use swipe your membership card, it was unlikely the purchase would be associated to you.
The story behind how Target found out a teenager was pregnant before her dad was is very interesting, and really gets me thinking what will happen when they monitor my behavior in-store.
Kmart secretly knowing that you are pregnant or you have colon cancer or whatever is not what I'd be worried about.
I'd be worried that they will either collaborate or get infiltrated by hackers, cops, and agencies. Then, one day I like a post on social media promoting wrongthink, and I'll be picked up.
> If the most advanced ad network can't figure out the language that I speak
The ad network absolutely knows you down to minute detail, but the only thing that matters is who bid the highest. Maybe the winner is the one with the most VC cash to burn?
Do you believe it? I once had to use facial recognition at a train station to get free toilet paper, which was labeled for "environmental protection," avoiding waste of paper. At that time, I was in pain and urgently had to sell my face just for a piece of toilet paper
yes, every human must be self sufficient at any time or be forced into selling their data. When moving through society keep drinking water, food, toilet paper, spare clothes, umbrella, mask, fake travel papers, wigs, and other necessary items allowing you to opt out of the panopticon.
Or do yourself a favor and adjust your diet so that you're regular. Then you never have to go anywhere that doesn't have your cherished bidet seat and squatty potty. Just wake up, "go", and we're done for the day!
…unless you have any bowel affecting disease/syndrome or you are travelling and you have neither regular eating schedule, nor full control of your diet…
This should be very familiar to people working with data in a lot of jurisdictions. I can speak to Europe but I think similar things exist elsewhere - data is less restricted in how and what you collect than it is how you use it. This makes a lot of sense, you should be able to have a basic record of ip addresses and access times for rate limiting, but that shouldn’t mean you can use it for advertising.
Similarly it seems reasonable that shops should be able to record for some purposes but not all.
I don't think "less restricted" is a good framing. How you are using it is the core, and you get to collect and store what's necessary for your legal uses, and use it for those uses.
You don't get to have access logs because there is no restriction on logging IPs, you get them because you argue a justified use of them, and thus you can have them to use them for it (and not for anything else).
I know what you mean but read this in context. You're less restricted in what you can collect compared to what you can do with it - any valid use case requiring video footage allows you to get video footage but that doesn't mean you can then do anything you want with it. The key is what are you using the data for.
You forget store. This depends a lot on the type of data. Duration, specific laws related to it and protection are very different for randomised numbers vs medical as an example.
I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable. It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.
I'm not worried about people collecting IPs, I'm worried about people who collect IPs being able to send those IPs out and get them associated with names, and send those names out and be supplied with dossiers.
When they start putting collecting IPs in the same bag as the rest of this, it's because they're just trying to legitimize this entire process. Collecting dossiers becomes traffic shaping, and of course people should be allowed to traffic shape - you could be getting DDOSed by terrorists!
edit: I'm not sure this comment was quite clear - it's 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem. IPs are just temporary identifiers, unless you can resolve them through what are essentially civilian intelligence organizations.
Don't the industry-imposed rules for handling credit cards work that way (restricting use of data you already have) though?
Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.
> 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem.
But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.
> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.
It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.
This is good. It means we have laws and rulings that understand the technology. That balance the need for business to protect their stores with people's privacy.
Free to record data but not free to process data... sounds a lot like books being stored rightfully but not analyzed by machine learning.
I have data on Google. Google has a TOS that says they can use my data. This could cover even future use cases, even though those future use cases I did not anticipate. So does Google have the right to use my data in this particular way?
I noticed that as well, it's a bit frustrating. I personally think if you're allowed to do something legally, you should be allowed to do it using technology.
It's seems silly to me that you can have a human being eyeball someone and claim it's so and so, but you can't use incredibly accurate technology to streamline that process.
I personally don't like the decay of polite society. I don't like asking a worker for a key to buy some deodorant. Rather than treat everyone like a criminal, why don't we just treat criminals like criminals. It's a tiny percentage of people that abuse polite society and we pretend like it's a huge problem that can only be attacked by erecting huge inconveniences for everyone. No, just punish criminals and build systems to target criminals rather than everyone. If you look at arrests, you'll see that among persons admitted to state prison 77% had five or more prior arrests. When do you say enough is enough and we can back off this surveillance state because we're too afraid to just lock up people that don't want to live in society.
If you flag the dozen or so people that come in to your business once a week to steal, you don't have to have as much surveillance in the store otherwise. Just check them out when they enter, very simple.
For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.
There are all manner of things you can and cannot do with 'data'. For example, you cannot purchase a Blu-Ray, rip its contents and post them on the internet. This shouldn't be that "interesting".
First paragraphs pretty clearly read to me like the issue isn’t “processing it,” it’s the indiscriminate filming of everybody who enters the store without consent that’s the problem.
Security filming is common in Australia and not outlawed by this ruling. It is specifically the non-discriminate use of facial recognition technology this ruling applies to.
The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.
The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:
> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?
I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.
Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?
Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...
It's a false equivalence to equate humans (even "super-recognizers") with a computer when it comes to matching large quantities of faces with names/PII.
At some point the numbers get big enough that you wouldn't be able to get the pictures of faces in front of the people who would recognize them fast enough.
Everyone who enters almost any store is "filmed" with their implicit consent. Cameras are everywhere, and certainly are everywhere in every Australian court as well.
The root comment is precisely right. Deriving data from filmed content -- the illusory private biometric data that we are leaving everywhere, constantly -- is what the purported transgression was.
Is this from the 90s? Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain? How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land? If you enter onto someone else's property you should play by their rules.
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.
You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.
Exactly. There is a limit to what a private company can do on private land, set by "the government" (here it'd be parliament). You don't seem to be an absolutist about this, so we both agree that the government can and should tell private businesses what they can do on private land. Then the issue is only where the line should be not whether there should be a line at all.
People here might be interested in Zennioptical's ID Guard technology, if they wear glasses. Evidently it's not perfect, but it does at least partially work: https://youtu.be/HOBdJ6nU03o?si=E_a6rMPAz5AOwytm
Business opportunity: sell covid masks with patterns designed to thwart facial recognition on them.
Why are they covid masks anyway? Medical personnel wears them during surgery, and there were those photos of ... some asian people i think ... wearing them outdoors to protect themselves from air pollution in their city too.
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.
What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?
This is more common than you’d think - often subsidiaries are distinct enough that the Canadian or Australian version survives the US parent’s bankruptcy.
And sometimes it’s just a different store that licensed the name for 100 years.
On a recent visit to the UK (from the US) I briefly thought I was in an alternate universe because their TJ Maxx stores are virtually identical but inexplicably called TK Maxx.
(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)
My other favorite example of this is the A&W Restaurants which in the states was a bit more of a fast food establishment. It was never that successful, but you'd see them every so often. Gone now in the states, but I believe its Canadian successor is still going strong.
A&W is exceptionally rural now, and I'm not 100% sure why - it's a weird combination of fast food (drive thru) + waitress/sit down ordering that doesn't really exist anywhere else (kind of how there are a few carhop/drive UP restaurants that still exist).
As an Australian, I can say that Kmart here is an absolute powerhouse. They sell highly curated goods made in China for very cheap, it's a dream for young people on a budget. Poor delivery services here pushes people toward brick and mortar stores too.
Kmart in Australia is pretty good to be fair. Cheap goods with good enough quality. I put them above Temu or Shein. For toys or pet accessories, they are unmatched in price anywhere else.
My house is full of kmart dog toys. I keep forgetting we got them there as they are good quality. It's a place you get everything, fairly cheap but good quality for the price. Notwithstanding TFA.
For stuff like cups, power boards, tooth brush holders, etc they are basically the best. The furniture is pretty garbage though and not really that cheap compared to something much better at ikea.
Even more astonishing to me is that we’ve not just simply allowed something like ubiquitous camera surveillance and facial recognition, increasingly with effectively 100% coverage, but most people have actively participated in it with all their various cameras they even installed inside their home, let alone set up neighborhood surveillance systems.
And yes, they are all tapped and not even Orwell imagined what we’ve done to ourselves. But don’t worry, it will only get more apparent and worse once things are far beyond too late, when Minority Report will be noted for its cute and naive depiction.
Orwell never imagined that the surveillance data would be worth so much money or that every single technological advancement could only be accessed once one agreed to surrender all of their privacy.
I was curious so read the Kmart wikipedia article over morning coffee. Seems like these (no longer) share any ownership with the original. Which I guess raises a philosophical question about names and existence that will require at least a second cup of coffee :-)
Yeah remember a decade or two ago they filed bankruptcy. Guess that is the wonders of Chapter 13 bankruptcy law in USA. And thanks to obfuscation of owner ship for corporations, god knows who owns them now.
We're living in state of anarcho-tyranny. The state is totally unable to stop shoplifters, so companies are increasingly relying on odious technology to handle the problem themselves, which is in turn denied.
The result is we're going to all get punished for it. Increasingly we're going to see a return policy that is less and less flexible until one day it is eliminated altogether.
And a rise in membership-only retailers, like Costco. These retailers can make the use of biometrics and other shrink-prevention mechanisms a condition of membership & entry.
Memberships also give retailers a way to kick miscreants out of an entire chain (vs. trespassing them from one location) and keep them out without risking a lawsuit for profiling or other verboten activities.
If I opened a store in San Francisco tomorrow it would be some kind of membership only deal, maybe a co-op to appeal to local politics. No way would I allow the general public inside unless I were selling bulk concrete or something else equally impossible to shoplift.
In what sense are you keeping the general public out? Some percentage of any population will be shoplifters.
What makes more sense is store sized vending machines. Pay for what you want and it is dispensed. Order on site or online. I'm surprised no one is doing this on a wide scale yet.
->store sized vending machines
Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]
Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.
Everything that is old is new again.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store#Innovations_1...
I'd be perfectly content with this model, but the problem is then they'd have to hire employees to do things! Stores would much rather have us pick everything ourselves, checkout ourselves, and have our cars remote detonated by robots automatically if the crime computer deems it appropriate.
That way they only have to hire two employees. One to drag carts around the parking lot and one to drag keys to all the locked cabinets of soap and shampoo and diapers and whatnot.
The main issue is spiky demand, you’d have keep a cadre of employees around to minimize peak latency. Offloading tasks to the shopper scales well with usage.
People willing to pay a membership fee like Costco are probably less likely to be shoplifters, plus signing up for a membership means they have your info which further discouraged shoplifting, and then if they do catch you then it's easier to ban you from all their stores.
Shoplifters aren't going to follow any of those rules, they'll just use fake or stolen card or identities.
But I think people still do it, I don't know if they still do it but Costco would check your receipt against what was in your trolley when I shopped there, if I remember correctly (10+ years ago).
This isn't a situation that requires a social contract where they follow some rules. The ease of shoplifters "not following the rules" with fake/stolen identities will simply approach the experience of someone trying to do the same with an airline ticket.
Costco now checks your picture against your card on entry.
You don't need a card to enter nor even a friend with one. Just say you're going to the pharmacy.
They don't check at the food court, either. Wouldn't surprise me if people have stole stuff via the big pizza boxes.
Or... just open up big warehouses, only do online sales, and then deliver to customer?
The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.
With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?
I guess it's up for interpretation whether stealing from an Amazon van is easier or harder than stealing from a store. Is it more risky for the thief to bring the Amazon van to the hood, or the hood to the store?
Welcome to iCostco, I love you
Unfortunately the state will never be able to stop or prevent it. There needs to be arrests and prosecutions though, and that is where the problems start. For a interesting example, look at California. A few years back, the state reverted medium-serious crimes back to the county for detainment. This moved the cost of incarceration back to the source, however, those inmates cannot be released. So if there is an overcrowding/capacity concern, the low-level offenses such as retail theft are often immediately released even if they are a repeat habitual recidivist offender with no disincentive to offend again.
For a vision of the future, look at YouTube videos of walking tours of San Francisco and Oakland. Entire streets for lease, 38% commercial availability rate. The Crocker Mall and San Francisco Centre Mall are empty, the latter for sale, losing over $1 billion in value.
Probably doesn't matter though, because most people ditched shopping and do everything online now.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/auction-san-franci...
SF Centre Mall tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN3JXQoM9AU
SF Crocker Galleria tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzuSQSA3brA
If only there were some way to substantially reduce the incentive for theft of consumer goods.
What could motivate people to theft? They must need something awfully badly. Perhaps fixing the underlying requirements could help.
They want money and there's no reason not to do it. This isn't a matter of meeting peoples needs, most thefts are not of anything necessary. It's just a job to them.
You're saying it in sort of a condescending way, but there's still truth.
Desperation leads to crime, true.
But also true: a lack of societal norms leads to crime. Any time we advocate or demonstrate disrespect, cheating, injustice, cruelty, unwarranted rule-breaking, doxing, or any kind of mob mentality we are contributing to it.
And yes your favorite political villains are all guilty of this, but we need to start with ourselves and the people close to us.
Why wouldn't we start with the biggest offenders?
You're getting downvoted but you're right, more and more people cannot afford to pay for life's necessities.
Wages have stagnated for decades as prices have increased. What possible solution is there other than to address the biggest elephant in the room.
I always wondered about framing this as a sort of self-defense position.
When I was working on a site a decade ago where people were constantly defrauding the users we built a lot of tools to creatively deal with these people to make them less effective. It became very clear that law enforcement wasn't prepared to deal with the problem (at the time at least, maybe they've gotten better) so we had to figure out anything that we could do to protect our users.
The fact that you're essentially only allowed to play defense is IMO the reason it keeps happening. If we were able to hire a cybersecuurity company to hack the people defrauding our users for us, we would have done it in a heartbeat and it would have been worth every penny. It always seemed like, in the US at least, this could have fallen under the 2nd amendment as a self defense response.
The issue, of course, with collecting biometric data to stop a problem like this is you are also collecting data from people who haven't done anything wrong at all. One false positive "anomaly" in the system, or a data breach, exposes innocent people to risk they were not informed about.
Your crisis doesn't exist, at least not in the US: https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/191247/reported-larceny-t...
Is it only California?
When personal responsibility fails to be exercised, personal liberty suffers.
I'm not sure that I would agree with the claim that the state is unable to stop shoplifters. The case here was Australia, but speaking to the United States:
You can't really do anything about shoplifting until after it happens. It's not a crime until it's been committed, then you can prosecute. The issue is there is a base level cost to do so, and it's going to take a very large amount of shoplifting to balance that. We as a society have basically accepted that certain crimes don't go punished, and it seems like low value shoplifting largely fits that category.
In turn, large companies have decided that they will instead collect data on their own until they have enough to make it a high value issue, with proof. Then the state will prosecute. The issue here is that companies do not get to illegally collect data, they still would have to do so within the bounds of the law. So what are those bounds? We say the Government can surveil us with impunity, but only for terrorism or whatever else gets brought under that umbrella. For "petty" crimes the government would need permission to collect the amount of data that these companies are and then build their case with that.
This isn't to say that shoplifting is okay, just that society doesn't seem to care all that much. Our reaction to companies taking actions like these will also show how much we seem to care about them as well. Spoiler on that last one: we don't seem to care (in the US).
It definitely depends on the state and store policy.
A Walmart in AZ has sent gigantic bouncers after me to detain me on suspicion of shoplifting a $5 bag of cat litter. In my state they are allowed to kidnap/imprison you until police arrive if they have 'reasonable suspicion' you're in the act of shoplifting, so yeah have fun guessing whether the guy with the walmart badge is actually security or just a rapist.
OTOH there are four critera for a legal stop -- they need to see you enter without the merchandise, select it from the shelf, conceal it, then walk past the point of sale AND all merchandise. And you have to have an unobstructed view of the person, because if they discard the item you stop them for, you're in for a world of (legal) hurt.
Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.
If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.
So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.
Depends on the state.
AZ:
>C. A merchant, or a merchant's agent or employee, with reasonable cause, may detain on the premises in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time any person who is suspected of shoplifting as prescribed in subsection A of this section for questioning or summoning a law enforcement officer.
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01805.htm
i.e. all they need is reasonable cause to suspect you are shoplifting. When I was detained no one ever saw me steal anything, I openly grabbed the cat litter, scanned it at the machine, paid for it, grabbed the receipt, then refused to show it to the receipt-checker (not about to slow down for that bullshit since it is now my property) so they just sent some dudes out to grab the cart out of my hands.
Anyone can dress like rentacop or Walmart security. Pull out the pepper spray, say "back away," and leave.
I'm not pulling out a weapon unless it is the very last option, but I did not enjoy the prospect of having to mull that decision. In the end I just never shopped at that Walmart again.
We could pass laws that allow and encourage security officers at grocery stores to get physical to stop shoplifting. Arm them too.
That's what Trump/MAGA america wants. They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime. They will gleeful cheer it on.
>We could pass laws that allow and encourage security officers at grocery stores to get physical to stop shoplifting. Arm them too.
That's already the law in a huge part of the country.
> They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime.
Places like Qt (gas station chain) in AZ have armed guys that are trained to shoot if lawful (armed robbery, etc).
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that shoplifting should not be punished? Wouldn’t lack of enforcement or punishment for wrongdoing only lead to more wrongdoing? Isn’t the well-accepted viewpoint on this website that if the cost of violating a law is lower than the profit, that is what companies will do. What makes you think people won’t make the same calculation?
The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.
I've spent a lot of time in Singapore. Not a nation that should be emulated.
Why?
This entire well is completely poisoned by the bad-faith whingeing of retailers end to end.
First of all; in times long past, retailers had zero shoplifting incidents, because every order was fulfilled by their employees, who would pick from the stock room and present the customer with a ready-to-take bag of their goods, and a purchase receipt. Shoplifting in this context was basically impossible.
The advent of customers picking out their own goods let to the introduction of customers attempting to leave the store without paying, but it also saved retailers incredible amounts of money, not having to pay to have employees both stock and pull orders.
However, because nothing is ever profitable enough, much further down the line (and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows) we get self checkouts, which are basically honor boxes with speakers. And that's fine, I love self checkout and my only complaint with it is now retailers are over-reliant on it, and, again in the name of cost-cutting, have 6 to 10 registers overseen by one worker, who has to sprint between them to sort out when the stupid things can't detect a light item, or have a conniption fit when you don't place a 75" television on them, and of course they have to also make sure all of those registers are ringing up the correct items, which has itself then given rise to bag checkers at the door.
And to be clear, I'm not like, endorsing any particular system here. I don't care how stores want to convey products to me terribly, just make it clear what the fuck I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. What I am saying is retail theft is largely enabled by retailers who do nothing but chase the bottom line and constantly try and make their stores work with fewer and fewer people who are less and less skilled over time and are then SHOCKED when someone just takes something, because their ludicrously under-staffed stores are incredibly easy to steal from, if you want to.
And I would ALSO point out that throughout this long history, the cost of slippage has been built into the business, because theft is far, far from the only reason a product that is purchased wholesale may not make it all the way to a paying customer. Retail supply chains and especially grocery ones are simply AWASH in waste, and somehow, all the time, these stores make money.
So no, as a customer and taxpayer, I don't particularly give much of a shit about shoplifting.
> However, because nothing is ever profitable enough
This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.
If you think they just kept those new profits forever -- where did they go? Because grocery is an infamously low-margin business to be in, even now.
> and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows
Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.
I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt
> The state is totally unable to stop shoplifters
National larceny rates in at least the US (but I'm fairly sure most Western countries) have consistently gone down for decades. There's significantly less shoplifting now on average than there was in the '80s or '90s.
>There's significantly less shoplifting now on average than there was in the '80s or '90s.
possibly, but are you seriously comparing now to the height of the crack epidemic in the US?
The rates in 2023 were 66% of what they were in 2010. That decline has not been driven by reduction in crack usage.
How could you possibly know that.
Retailers have no reason to report crime they do not expect to be investigated or prosecuted.
Don't say insurance because nobody is reporting shoplifting to their insurance.
The falling shrinkage is a good indicator, although it’s imperfect for obvious reasons. Of course, there are anomalies like COVID, but otherwise the trend is clear. Also when some entity like supermarket chains or their advocacy groups tried to split up shrinkage by its causes in the past decades, even the shoplifting part fell. So there is no better statistics, and that tells that shoplifting is probably falling.
Of course, you cannot know, but statistics is quite clear that shoplifting decrease is way more probable than increase, and you need some other reasons to advocate for increasing shoplifting. So when somebody does that, it’s highly probable that not because shoplifting is actually increasing.
Wouldn't insurance rates go up if they reported all of the shoplifting? I suspect most large company's do some sort of self insurance setup though.
There's really no insurance for retail shoplifting.
Big retailers just bake crime into the cost of goods sold.
As part of lobbying for changes to laws, or for more police funding - stores accurately track "shrinkage", why are you so certain it's not being reported?
Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters. If yours is not, think long and hard about your choices at the next election.
Edit: I do love the down votes. It kind of proves the point. People want to complain, but don’t want to do anything about it or hold themselves responsible for the fact that they are the ones who chose the situation they are in. Literally. At the ballot box.
The larceny/theft rate in Kansas City, MO is almost 10X the rate of San Francisco, CA.
Remind me again who I should be voting for?
What state has a zero shoplifting rate? You're being downvoted because you made a politically motivated statement that's very clearly untrue.
If the statement that actually enforcing law will lower crime is politically motivated, then I’m afraid to ask what statement isn’t. Is it OK to state that 2+2 = 4, or does that have political undertones too?
[delayed]
Note that you didn't answer the question about which state has zero shoplifting.
> Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters.
In your defense, you didn't claim zero explicitly (but did heavily imply it), but you also ignored the question
You didn't say that "actually enforcing law will lower crime." You said "Many states are completely able to stop shoplifters." And then you tied it to voting. The initial statement is bullshit and the tie to voting makes it politically-motivated bullshit.
I've seen a shoplifter tackled to ground in AZ by loss prevention a few times. One resulted in a broken nose. I bet that person will not shoplift again. And I spent years in CA watching shoplifters walk out and store personnel saying they are NOT allowed to do anything and they were told to not call police since they do nothing and waste time. Difference? one state voted to decriminalize shoplifting below a certain amount and one did not.
The main judgement here seems to be: not everyone was there to get a refund, therefore, just entering the store is not an opt-in consent to biometric scans.
As a counter-example: Australian clubbing venues use facial recognition and id verification to identify banned individuals and detect fake documentation. This is required on condition of entry (therefore, opt-in), and this information is shared across all partner venues.
https://scantek.com/facial-biometric-matching-technology-sca...
Something that you are required to do by every single venue that offers a service in order to participate is not really what I would call opt in. Yes, you can opt out by never going to a nightclub, but that seems different.
You can’t really call something opt-in if opting out means that you are barred from participating in an entire class of activity unrelated to what you opted out of.
As a counter example, the TSA in the US is now starting to use facial scans for ID, but you can opt out by telling the agent. It does not mean that you cannot go flying, it means that they use a human to identify you without the use of computerized facial scans.
I mean, the TSA already scans your passport/id, and knows every other detail about your trip. Is a facial scan really adding much more? Last time I entered the country they used facial recognition and I didn't even need to show my passport. So they obviously already had the data to recognize me from my passport photo. And this was over two years ago.
To enter a movie theater, you have to buy a ticket. If you don't, you're barred from the entire class of activity of movie-going.
Where is the difference?
Do you really not see the difference between having to pay for a service and having to upload biometric data in a centralized database under someone else’s control?
For one, I don’t have to buy a ticket. Many theaters participate in programs where you can get a ticket as a reward for other activities (credit card points, eg). The ticket sale is determined by the theater, and is not part of a government supported scheme to prevent some people from ever seeing a movie in any theater, ever.
Finally, the sale of a ticket is necessary for the operation of many movie theaters. It is intrinsic to the business model. The nightclub could operate the service, and even work with ban lists without the centralized biometric database.
> activity unrelated to what you opted out of
Going to see a movie is obviously not unrelated to buying a movie ticket.
The difference is that buying a ticket isn't marketed as "opt-in".
This comment cannot be done in faith. Buying a ticket versus buying a ticket AND being profiled by all other venues are clearly two different things.
How is this the case? Presumably the scenario where they have live camera feeds and a security guard recognizes a banned person on them and removes them would be fine. Why does replacing the human with an algorithm legally make a difference? Did people consent to being facially recognized by a human security guard?
I think that it's analogous to when my genitals are fondled by a TSA agent because I opt out of body scans. The memory of the feeling of them caressing my shape lives on only in their brain instead of being permanently recorded in a database.
that distinction won't last more than a few more years
That's not a counter-example to the judgment reasoning you highlight: everyone entering a night club is there to enter a night club, not everyone entering a K-mart is there to get a refund.
I'm not sure I see the distinction.
Everyone trying to enter K-mart is trying to enter K-mart just like the night club. Everyone going into the night club is not there to drink/meet someone/dance/use the restroom/make a drug deal Just like not everyone going into K-Mart is there to shop/browse/by a snack/get a refund/steal something
Crazy. Seems like a good application, but there is lots of potential for abuse.
casinos have been doing this for years, its nothing new.
nightclubs want lots of customers especially attractive women, and don't want lots of problems. What's the potential for abuse? Detecting your attractiveness or ethnicity in order to turn you away would be abuses, but is that what you are thinking of or alleging? because if it's just facial recognition, they don't have an incentive to misidentify people
This is indiscriminate data collection. Some of the risk comes from the correlation with other sources of data by LEO with overly broad access to fine grained data.
Big Brother is not watching you. Instead, thousands of Little Brothers are patiently watching their little corner of the world, recording license plates, logging phone locations, tracking credit card usage. Big Brother doesn’t need to see you, he just asks them to tell him what he wants to know.
if anything is stored, "we know you were at this night club at this time" is pretty sensitive information? depending on the kind of club.
Sounds like the tech wasn't deployed for "Refund Fraud" (it would be easier to just use facial recognition when a refund was made) but instead deployed across all stores to see what they could do with the data.
I'd be very surprised if refund fraud was the only POC that this facial recognition data was used for.
Sadly been going to HomeDepot long enough to have been there before all the cages were put up. E.g. if you want a small roll of wire, gotta find an associate to open the cage, get the wire, and walk with you to checkout to make sure you pay. I asked once if all the was necessary, and the experienced associate related some real horror stories such as folks putting a 200 ft roll of 4 guage onto a cart and simply walking out. That is impressive both in regard to the brazenness, and because someone could lift such a roll onto a cart (likely with a partner, but still).
The cages are used in stores with high shoplifting rates. They aren't in all stores.
Where I live it's the same at Target, CVS, Walgreens. Lots of stuff is locked up and you have to get someone to open the cages
Never had to do this at home Depot. Your local area is just a high shoplifting area.
Of course, but fraud/theft prevention is easier to defend legally. There are exceptions for exactly those use cases.
> I'd be very surprised if refund fraud was the only POC that this facial recognition data was used for.
The only conceivably legal POC.
Proof of Concept?
Person of Color?
Point of Contact?
I heard stories about how super advanced invasive surveillance let's people like Target know that you're pregnant before you actually know yourself. But I just don't buy it.
I get insane advertisements, even from places like YouTube that know me well. I get advertisements for Bumble featuring what looks like a teenage boy telling me you'll never know what you'll find on Bumble, which is weird considering I'm a married straight dude. Sometimes I even get ads in different languages.
If the most advanced ad network can't figure out the language that I speak, I'm less worried about Kmart doing some nefarious profiling based on my stride.
I like technology that targets fraud, because I like living in a high trust society. I'm annoyed that people abuse the system and that's why we can't have nice things. You could probably just target the worst 1% and basically go back to deodorants not being locked away behind glass.
> I heard stories about how super advanced invasive surveillance let's people like Target know that you're pregnant before you actually know yourself. But I just don't buy it.
I believe it. But it wasn't super-advanced surveillance. It was, as I recall, 2010's "machine learning" basically drawing inferences about purchase history to determine what sorts of personalized advertisements to mail to you or print on your receipts, or whatever.
I believe it because I worked at another large American retailer similar to Target at the time and though I was not directly involved, I was aware that other departments in our company were working on similar things. It wasn't that advanced or outlandish, it was just finding trends in the huge amount of historical purchase data we had. I can absolutely believe that it was similar at Target. People who bought these things typically bought baby-related stuff 3-6 months later, so lets send them some coupons for that baby-related stuff in 2 months. It's unlikely the fact it was baby-related was actually relevant, it probably just sent coupons for whatever the predicted purchases were.
An individuals purchase history was probably correlated either by rewards program membership (preferred) or credit cards used. If you just paid cash and didn't use swipe your membership card, it was unlikely the purchase would be associated to you.
The story behind how Target found out a teenager was pregnant before her dad was is very interesting, and really gets me thinking what will happen when they monitor my behavior in-store.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Kmart secretly knowing that you are pregnant or you have colon cancer or whatever is not what I'd be worried about.
I'd be worried that they will either collaborate or get infiltrated by hackers, cops, and agencies. Then, one day I like a post on social media promoting wrongthink, and I'll be picked up.
> If the most advanced ad network can't figure out the language that I speak
The ad network absolutely knows you down to minute detail, but the only thing that matters is who bid the highest. Maybe the winner is the one with the most VC cash to burn?
Either their CISO was shut out of the decision making, the SLT decided it was a risk worth taking, or their CISO was absolutely asleep at the wheel.
Do you believe it? I once had to use facial recognition at a train station to get free toilet paper, which was labeled for "environmental protection," avoiding waste of paper. At that time, I was in pain and urgently had to sell my face just for a piece of toilet paper
Somewhere in China, you have to watch ads to get the toilet paper. It made the rounds a few days ago (https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/chinas-public-toilets-require-w...)
In the US we just got rid of the public toilets instead.
Just take toilet paper all the time with you. Saves me the stress from having to think about if a public toilet has some.
yes, every human must be self sufficient at any time or be forced into selling their data. When moving through society keep drinking water, food, toilet paper, spare clothes, umbrella, mask, fake travel papers, wigs, and other necessary items allowing you to opt out of the panopticon.
This is a tourist survival skill in Russia.
Or do yourself a favor and adjust your diet so that you're regular. Then you never have to go anywhere that doesn't have your cherished bidet seat and squatty potty. Just wake up, "go", and we're done for the day!
…unless you have any bowel affecting disease/syndrome or you are travelling and you have neither regular eating schedule, nor full control of your diet…
fellas, did you know that women generally use toilet paper, even if they are regular?
this is the comment and reply chain that actually dispelled HN's charm for me.
> Why don't you just (something asinine)
is a very common HN, and social media at large, comment lol
Agree. My simple advice is: Don't be full of shit when leaving home.
Doesn't everyone do a colonic before they leave their house?
We really are living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Perfect application for Smart Pipe authentication https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
What they really need is assial recognition. Sounds like a great start-up idea! YC 2026?
Isn't that what Sam Altman's Orb thing is about?
Who else but me is surprised that Kmart still exists somewhere?
Interesting line to draw:
- you can record all manner of video in your store...
- but you can't process it in this particular way.
This should be very familiar to people working with data in a lot of jurisdictions. I can speak to Europe but I think similar things exist elsewhere - data is less restricted in how and what you collect than it is how you use it. This makes a lot of sense, you should be able to have a basic record of ip addresses and access times for rate limiting, but that shouldn’t mean you can use it for advertising.
Similarly it seems reasonable that shops should be able to record for some purposes but not all.
I don't think "less restricted" is a good framing. How you are using it is the core, and you get to collect and store what's necessary for your legal uses, and use it for those uses. You don't get to have access logs because there is no restriction on logging IPs, you get them because you argue a justified use of them, and thus you can have them to use them for it (and not for anything else).
I know what you mean but read this in context. You're less restricted in what you can collect compared to what you can do with it - any valid use case requiring video footage allows you to get video footage but that doesn't mean you can then do anything you want with it. The key is what are you using the data for.
And less restricted does not mean no restriction.
You forget store. This depends a lot on the type of data. Duration, specific laws related to it and protection are very different for randomised numbers vs medical as an example.
> This makes a lot of sense
I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable. It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.
I'm not worried about people collecting IPs, I'm worried about people who collect IPs being able to send those IPs out and get them associated with names, and send those names out and be supplied with dossiers.
When they start putting collecting IPs in the same bag as the rest of this, it's because they're just trying to legitimize this entire process. Collecting dossiers becomes traffic shaping, and of course people should be allowed to traffic shape - you could be getting DDOSed by terrorists!
edit: I'm not sure this comment was quite clear - it's 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem. IPs are just temporary identifiers, unless you can resolve them through what are essentially civilian intelligence organizations.
Having someone else pick up (IE buy) your prescription is legal and commonplace for obvious reasons. https://legalclarity.org/can-someone-else-pick-up-my-prescri...
Thus I’m regularly allowed to buy drugs I’m not legally allowed to use. “Using a prescription medication that was not prescribed to you is illegal under both federal and state laws.” https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-use-someone-elses-...
Don't the industry-imposed rules for handling credit cards work that way (restricting use of data you already have) though?
Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.
Retaining credit card numbers is problematic in and of itself. Then you're just operating a skimmer.
>It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.
Well, since you mention it: I have prescription drugs that I am allowed to buy, but I am NOT allowed to abuse them. I must take exactly 1 each day.
> 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem.
But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.
> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.
It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.
This is good. It means we have laws and rulings that understand the technology. That balance the need for business to protect their stores with people's privacy.
Free to record data but not free to process data... sounds a lot like books being stored rightfully but not analyzed by machine learning.
I have data on Google. Google has a TOS that says they can use my data. This could cover even future use cases, even though those future use cases I did not anticipate. So does Google have the right to use my data in this particular way?
I noticed that as well, it's a bit frustrating. I personally think if you're allowed to do something legally, you should be allowed to do it using technology.
It's seems silly to me that you can have a human being eyeball someone and claim it's so and so, but you can't use incredibly accurate technology to streamline that process.
I personally don't like the decay of polite society. I don't like asking a worker for a key to buy some deodorant. Rather than treat everyone like a criminal, why don't we just treat criminals like criminals. It's a tiny percentage of people that abuse polite society and we pretend like it's a huge problem that can only be attacked by erecting huge inconveniences for everyone. No, just punish criminals and build systems to target criminals rather than everyone. If you look at arrests, you'll see that among persons admitted to state prison 77% had five or more prior arrests. When do you say enough is enough and we can back off this surveillance state because we're too afraid to just lock up people that don't want to live in society.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
How does facial recognition reduce the surveillance state there?
If you flag the dozen or so people that come in to your business once a week to steal, you don't have to have as much surveillance in the store otherwise. Just check them out when they enter, very simple.
For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.
There are all manner of things you can and cannot do with 'data'. For example, you cannot purchase a Blu-Ray, rip its contents and post them on the internet. This shouldn't be that "interesting".
First paragraphs pretty clearly read to me like the issue isn’t “processing it,” it’s the indiscriminate filming of everybody who enters the store without consent that’s the problem.
Security filming is common in Australia and not outlawed by this ruling. It is specifically the non-discriminate use of facial recognition technology this ruling applies to.
The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.
The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:
> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?
https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/blog/is-there-a-place-for-facia...
I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.
Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?
Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...
It's a false equivalence to equate humans (even "super-recognizers") with a computer when it comes to matching large quantities of faces with names/PII.
At some point the numbers get big enough that you wouldn't be able to get the pictures of faces in front of the people who would recognize them fast enough.
I don’t understand it either, but it’s just one thing she said she will consider. No idea how much of a factor it is.
Everyone who enters almost any store is "filmed" with their implicit consent. Cameras are everywhere, and certainly are everywhere in every Australian court as well.
The root comment is precisely right. Deriving data from filmed content -- the illusory private biometric data that we are leaving everywhere, constantly -- is what the purported transgression was.
Very well could be that I am misreading it.
Is this from the 90s? Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain? How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land? If you enter onto someone else's property you should play by their rules.
In Australia we expect companies to follow the rule of law, which encodes the expectations of society.
The Australian Privacy Act falls well short of European standards, but it does encode some rights for people that businesses must abide by.
And filming people who walk into a private store is not a violation of any Australian law.
In the US we expect the government to respect private property
There are obviously things you can't do on your private property though.
Unfortunately often at the expense of virtually every consideration.
hyperbolic
Dismissive
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.
You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.
Grabbing and selling your organs is illegal. This isn't difficult to understand
Exactly. There is a limit to what a private company can do on private land, set by "the government" (here it'd be parliament). You don't seem to be an absolutist about this, so we both agree that the government can and should tell private businesses what they can do on private land. Then the issue is only where the line should be not whether there should be a line at all.
I agree, it's simple to understand. Running biometric capture & analysis on every customer is also illegal in Australia.
Ease off the gas man
>Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain?
Me. Unless it's clearly stated outside. It's why I wear a covid mask when shopping.
Wearing a mask alone isn't sufficient anymore.
At best it degrades overall recognition but doesn't fully prevent it
People here might be interested in Zennioptical's ID Guard technology, if they wear glasses. Evidently it's not perfect, but it does at least partially work: https://youtu.be/HOBdJ6nU03o?si=E_a6rMPAz5AOwytm
Business opportunity: sell covid masks with patterns designed to thwart facial recognition on them.
Why are they covid masks anyway? Medical personnel wears them during surgery, and there were those photos of ... some asian people i think ... wearing them outdoors to protect themselves from air pollution in their city too.
Because this person never knew they existed until covid and now wearing it has become a core part of their identity.
That's why I wear Groucho glasses.
So to be clear, you wear a mask even though you don't expect to be recorded?
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide
It generally owns more weapons than your average deluded shop owner.
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.
What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?
We are talking about doing a lawful act, not whatever you want. It isn't illegal to record.
The article is literally about that specific thing being illegal, which is exactly what parent is complaining about?
The court didn't find that it was unlawful to record.
What's more surprising is that Kmart still exists...
Kmart in Australia has been owned by Coles Australia since 1978, and since 1994 has had no association with the US Kmart.
It's very successful in Australia.
Additional, Australia has a Target that isn't at all related to Target US.
Which also now owned by the same owners of Kmart (Coles Group, now owned by Wesfarmers).
And both Kmart and Target Australia operations have merged (though still operating 2 separate brands)
Kmart in Australia is best thought of as a fork from the original. The original in the United States is effectively defunct now.
This is more common than you’d think - often subsidiaries are distinct enough that the Canadian or Australian version survives the US parent’s bankruptcy.
And sometimes it’s just a different store that licensed the name for 100 years.
On a recent visit to the UK (from the US) I briefly thought I was in an alternate universe because their TJ Maxx stores are virtually identical but inexplicably called TK Maxx.
(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)
My other favorite example of this is the A&W Restaurants which in the states was a bit more of a fast food establishment. It was never that successful, but you'd see them every so often. Gone now in the states, but I believe its Canadian successor is still going strong.
There's still quite a few A&W restaurants around in the US though they are rareish.
https://awrestaurants.com/locations-list/
400+ according to their wikipedia entry.
A&W is exceptionally rural now, and I'm not 100% sure why - it's a weird combination of fast food (drive thru) + waitress/sit down ordering that doesn't really exist anywhere else (kind of how there are a few carhop/drive UP restaurants that still exist).
There are bunch of A&W restaurants in Okinawa as well and as far as I know, it's popular.
The Canadian A&Ws are very good as far as fast food burger joints go. The American version is quite shitty though, last time I saw one years ago.
Australia also still has E.B Games.
As an Australian, I can say that Kmart here is an absolute powerhouse. They sell highly curated goods made in China for very cheap, it's a dream for young people on a budget. Poor delivery services here pushes people toward brick and mortar stores too.
Amazon is not too strong in Australia in terms of variety or price. So kmart is great and free delivery over a small amount makes it convenient.
Kmart in Australia is pretty good to be fair. Cheap goods with good enough quality. I put them above Temu or Shein. For toys or pet accessories, they are unmatched in price anywhere else.
My house is full of kmart dog toys. I keep forgetting we got them there as they are good quality. It's a place you get everything, fairly cheap but good quality for the price. Notwithstanding TFA.
For stuff like cups, power boards, tooth brush holders, etc they are basically the best. The furniture is pretty garbage though and not really that cheap compared to something much better at ikea.
Woolworths too!
Even more astonishing to me is that we’ve not just simply allowed something like ubiquitous camera surveillance and facial recognition, increasingly with effectively 100% coverage, but most people have actively participated in it with all their various cameras they even installed inside their home, let alone set up neighborhood surveillance systems.
And yes, they are all tapped and not even Orwell imagined what we’ve done to ourselves. But don’t worry, it will only get more apparent and worse once things are far beyond too late, when Minority Report will be noted for its cute and naive depiction.
Orwell never imagined that the surveillance data would be worth so much money or that every single technological advancement could only be accessed once one agreed to surrender all of their privacy.
This is Australia
Yes, I saw that in the article. What's your point, that if in Australia it's not real?
I was curious so read the Kmart wikipedia article over morning coffee. Seems like these (no longer) share any ownership with the original. Which I guess raises a philosophical question about names and existence that will require at least a second cup of coffee :-)
to be fair, Australia does kind of seem like a made up place with made up animals
too cheap to die
Yeah remember a decade or two ago they filed bankruptcy. Guess that is the wonders of Chapter 13 bankruptcy law in USA. And thanks to obfuscation of owner ship for corporations, god knows who owns them now.
Kmart is still a thing? I haven't seen one in the US in YEARS.
As mentioned in other comments, they're effectively a different store in Australia
SAME, what the heck. I know there's one in GUAM of all places...
Any company that does this should have mandatory facial recognition AI cameras in the baord room. That's where the real crime is happening.
Drug tests too.
Kmart exists?
In Australia, apparently
Good to see Kmart back in action.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
This is the problem with America
Australia
I get the desire to limit data collection, but banning tech that deters and punishes crime is bad policy.