Comment by inetknght
5 months ago
> just use cash/certified check from now on
You might want to discover about sophistication and pervasive facial recognition technology used by major retailers. Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.
Are you aware of cases where it is used for more that theft prevention/manual review of CCTV?
I'm not aware of any big retailers using facial data for targeting vouchers or anything similar.
Simple things like "did walk through the door with a child" would be pretty valuable data, yet as far as I know, nobody uses it.
>Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.
They can already track you through your phone and/or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?
I don’t know about the US but in the UK they did it ostensibly to catch shoplifters.
We have a major problem with “professional” thieves stealing because the big chains don’t want to pay cashiers anymore.
You see a screen with your face on it in places like Waitrose self service checkouts now. It’s their way of saying “we know who you are”.
Tracking cash purchases is just a side bonus for them.
idk why, but they do
Got a source on retailers actively doing this?
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Is there actual evidence of this, like anywhere?
Facial recognition on a small corpus of known faces (what everyone experiences on Facebook, their phones, etc) is an easy problem.
Walmart picking up a face walking into a store and matching it against 30 million possibilities is going to return so many false positive matches it’s going to be completely useless.
Facial recognition is illegal where I live, both for gov't and commercial uses. Several major cities in the US have banned it (e.g., San Francisco, Boston, etc.).