If they're collecting biometric data without posting a sign they are breaking the law, that requirement to post a sign is why this story about Wegmans is public at all, Wegmans posted signs as required.
If they are, and aren't posting signs, that would be a story in itself. Of course it could still be happening, it sounds like the law is fairly toothless, but it did get Wegmans to post the sign, so probably not useless.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Local member owned food co-ops would be a good alternative if there's one near you.
They don't have to be fancy and expensive. My local co-op strives to offer affordable options on most staples and bulk foods, and frequently undercuts the chains (including Wegmans) on produce, especially local produce when they can source it.
Do they have 20 types of chips and 300 cereals? No, but I can shop in a 20-30 minutes instead of the hour minimum Wegmans demands.
It recently dawned on me the cognitive simplicity of selecting a smaller store like the co-op. At our local one, the employees are really nice and selections really easy.
I have not yet moved over, but I can see a lot of advantages.
> "We trust our customers and do not conduct surveillance on them. When necessary, we take appropriate action, including having security cameras and security guards in our stores, to help ensure the safety of our customers and Crew Members," the company said.
> Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I know of at least one chain that uses them to flag certain people to loss prevention or security when they enter the store, either because of shoplifting or because they were trespassed in the past.
>This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I've heard the idea of combining multiple misdemeanor thefts to make a felony. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't that require an ongoing criminal conspiracy/enterprise to "combine" such disparate acts into a single, chargeable crime?
Some state laws do "upgrade" crimes, both misdemeanor --> felony and felony --> more serious felony based on prior convictions, but not (AFAIK) with multiple separate acts whose aggregate value is greater than the cutoff between petty theft and grand theft.
What's more, it's the local prosecutor who decides what charges to bring against someone accused of shoplifting, not the "Loss Prevention" team at a store or its corporate parent.
The idea just seems unlike how local/state laws and justice systems work in the US.
I could be (and likely am) wrong about this, but I've been unable to find state laws[0] which specify that multiple, separate acts of shoplifting can be combined into a single grand theft felony.
Would you share which states have such laws? It would be much appreciated!
You could always go to a Walmart and look up to see if they bothered to even wire the cameras or if the plug was literally dangling from the cameras over the entire store.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
I would prefer they require face scanning vs. locking everything up. The police in my city don’t arrest people for shoplifting, or a range of petty crimes for that matter. If you don’t like face scanning no one makes you shop there.
When crime is unpunished and the police won’t do anything and the politicians don’t care, then businesses either have to adapt with new models or close
Police in my city are quite happy to lock people up for shoplifting. Random stores still lock up the majority of their inventory. I’m not sure how much that’s correlated.
Kind of a strange stance from someone with the name "monero-xmr". If scanning everyone's face for the purpose of going after petty crimes is justified, why shouldn't it be illegal to use monero for the purpose of going after other crimes?
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
Repeat shoplifters? Please that’s a thinly veiled excuse, the actual reason is so they can build more accurate analytical models to screw you over more.
I don't doubt that the biometrics analytics dystopia is coming, but shoplifting is a huge issue in some areas. Biometrics surveillance still sucks, but I'll believe it is about theft at this time.
It's not only at groceries stores, it's everywhere. For example at TSA security line and (sometimes) when boarding flights at the gate. You can (and should) exercise your right to opt-out every single time, before that right is taken away.
Omg I sound like Richard Stallman... anyway, he was right all along.
I used to always opt out at TSA checkpoints. Then I decided that of all places, the airport makes the most sense to use biometrics. I mean, a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent.
What scares me about TSA using it is that it normalizes its use. Next it's at stadiums. Then Wegmans. If it would stop at airports, then I would be okay with it.
Make sure to opt-out before handing your ID over to the agent. They will claim you can no longer opt-out at that point, even before scanning. I had one plead to my wife to go through, because they are being watched by management and it wouldn't look good.
What really annoys me is when I politely decline the facial scan of TSA, and the agent makes some snide comment about my picture on my identification or something. And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I'm pretty sure they're told some things to say. I overheard one telling someone the line about how it doesn't matter because there's cameras everywhere so you shouldn't opt out. Bizarrely, the agents seemed to be checking IDs manually that day!
>And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I get the temptation to do this, I really do, but I really don't recommend this. The TSA is in a position to make your day much worse. It's better just to opt-out and say nothing. Opting out is well within your rights (it's posted on the sign at the start of the line).
Follow instructions. Keep your mouth shut. Eyes forward. On your way.
> Ask Wegmans directly to exclude you from facial recognition - Send an email to their privacy team
The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.
Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.
I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"
They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.
I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!
The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.
The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.
Some places that would do face recognition would not do gait analysis, and so you defeat those. Additionally, if you prevent them from doing face recognition and they can do gait recognition, they will be forced to use gait recognition, which is likely more expensive or less reliable, which will limit their ability to do it in a widespread fashion or cost them more to do so.
Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.
It’s unreliable and difficult. The most recent failure (made the news) was the laughable attempt to link the J6 bomber to a random police officer. Gait analysis belongs in the movies or maybe in some one-off national security investigation where nothing else is available.
That’s just not possible because it’s unenforceable at best and ignores the myriad ways around it “legally” that still would be workable even if it’s “illegal”
For example it’s illegal to hire foreign undocumented labor but in literally zero of the companies who have been raided recently the only people punished were the working people who are just trying to live
I think we're far past the point where you can avoid being tracked anywhere in the world, and that's even if you wear sunglasses, a hat, and you use no technology (no phone, etc).
Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".
If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.
Maybe, but they're also incentivized to make people believe they are doing more than they are, and with higher accuracy, because it makes people give up entirely and make no effort to protect their privacy.
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and what's that? oh right! we’re one of the few sites that still respects do not track — and always have.
How do I get Kroger to not scan my face? All these grocer companies are doing this same market analysis seemingly without giving good faith notice. I guess they are not legally required to inform their targets. It seems there needs to be some improvement in consumer protection laws. Dunnhumby and 84.51° are thick into this "taking".
so even if you don't have your face scanned on the register, unless you're paying cash they'd still know who you are right? don't most people have passports? real ID is also a thing. if you're concerned about a hostile government wearing a mask at a grocery store isn't going to do anything sadly. not even counting things like gait analysis, security cameras or tracking your phone
Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).
personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.
- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do
> law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict,
Or, amazing life hack, don’t do crimes, on video or otherwise.
Not saying there are no privacy concerns, but I WANT this used in court against criminals
Do you agree that all current laws are just and correct, and are you confident that nobody will ever come into power who wants to make illegal something you believe is just and right to do?
I don't disagree, but I don't think private companies should be able to both keep videos indefinitely and for those videos to be accessible to the government for arbitrary goals.
I do pay cash. I don't have a passport. You can opt out of Real ID.
Anyways, the solution, as always, is noise. They leave their data pipelines open and assume all the data is mostly clean. There needs to be a massive technological development for the population to just clog those channels with so much noise they become effectively useless.
You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?
These are not private stores. They are open to the public. This comes with several other requirements that a truly "private store" would not have to follow. There is a massive body of law which defines this.
I fear people will just get used to it just like other means of mass surveillance then wonder why they're being harassed with petty pretexts based on this data.
This is already the case. The largest supermarket chain in my relatively wealthy area has had multiple cameras per aisle hanging about ~3 feet above your head + monitors in each aisle that show some, but not all, camera views, for over a decade now.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
I don't think there is any alternative to this. I assume every corporation is filming me in their stores, building shopper profiles, that granularly identify me in every conceivable way. I am not surprised at all that Wegmans is taking a picture of my face. It's good to know, it's good for this to be in the news, but I can't imagine any grocery store, not taking advantage of video surveillance, profiling, all of that stuff if it will help them sell more.
FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
This is defeatist. You imply that local retailers are in on this as well, I know for a fact that my local co-op is not. Neither is the local farm stand or the local salvage grocery store. If you aren’t in a huge metro, shop local and you’ll do fine.
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
I want people to finally get mad enough that they do something about it instead of sitting here with half ass solutions and just bitching about it.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
They always show me my total before the cars swipe, so as long as the obfuscation works until the card swipe, at least it would prevent dynamic pricing.
I mean that assumes that you can’t assign the highest price to non-facially recognized people.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
I'll share this here now that I only drive EVs, but I suppose cashiers and random people at King Soopers(major grocer in Colorado, associated with Kroger's) would enter 555-555-5555 as their phone number for their rewards, and every time I would pump gas at their stations I would get $1/gallon off.
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
We need a startup to make those super realistic face masks easy to make and use. Celebrities could license their faces to make up for movies and tv being AI generated.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
> I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
How does surveillance prevalent with online delivery services substantially differ from biometric ones?
> In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
This just doesn't make sense.
Are you asserting that people going into grocery stores now are more likely to commit theft due to those using online delivery services no longer engaging in on-premise shopping?
Or is it your premise that people who typically use online delivery services only go into grocery stores to steal?
Are you suggesting that a shift to online shopping led to a new demographic going to grocery stores in person? I would have expected that demographic would have went to grocery stores all along. What has changed that introduced a new demographic? And why does it mean security has to change?
Overall foot traffic is down in stores. People who shop online don't go to the store as often, and when they do they expect a worthwhile experience and to probably spend more. They're going to the grocery stores with the craft beer on tap, proper restaurants, etc. They know their online shopping is already monitored and cashless, so it's only a minor annoyance to see that in person. Not many are going to walk away just because of that. Those nicer stores are also in the wealthier neighborhoods where the expectation is safety while they spend extra time with the shiny new amenities in a smaller more peaceful crowd.
The people who avoid online and delivery may not have a choice and are more price sensitive or likely to shoplift, so those other stores also have to increase security.
I'm saying that people have become segregated. The suburbanite middle and upper classes don't "stop by on the way home from work" anymore and they aren't leaving home just to shop unless it's worth the hassle. They expect much higher levels of convenience and safety than ever before. Increased security everywhere makes sense.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Just because they haven't announced it doesn't mean they're not using it.
Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
All those security cameras are there for a reason.
If they're collecting biometric data without posting a sign they are breaking the law, that requirement to post a sign is why this story about Wegmans is public at all, Wegmans posted signs as required.
If they are, and aren't posting signs, that would be a story in itself. Of course it could still be happening, it sounds like the law is fairly toothless, but it did get Wegmans to post the sign, so probably not useless.
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-wegmans-is-storing-biometric-...
I havent been seeing any stores prosecute theft in a long time.
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> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Local member owned food co-ops would be a good alternative if there's one near you.
They don't have to be fancy and expensive. My local co-op strives to offer affordable options on most staples and bulk foods, and frequently undercuts the chains (including Wegmans) on produce, especially local produce when they can source it.
Do they have 20 types of chips and 300 cereals? No, but I can shop in a 20-30 minutes instead of the hour minimum Wegmans demands.
It recently dawned on me the cognitive simplicity of selecting a smaller store like the co-op. At our local one, the employees are really nice and selections really easy. I have not yet moved over, but I can see a lot of advantages.
At least Trader Joe's does not have surveillance cameras (at all). https://dan.bulwinkle.net/blog/trader-joes-does-not-have-sur...
They don't... except when they do:
> "We trust our customers and do not conduct surveillance on them. When necessary, we take appropriate action, including having security cameras and security guards in our stores, to help ensure the safety of our customers and Crew Members," the company said.
https://abc7.com/post/trader-joes-targeted-in-7-socal-armed-...
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> Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I know of at least one chain that uses them to flag certain people to loss prevention or security when they enter the store, either because of shoplifting or because they were trespassed in the past.
If only this was the only use and the data wasn't sold/used against people not committing crimes.
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>This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I've heard the idea of combining multiple misdemeanor thefts to make a felony. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't that require an ongoing criminal conspiracy/enterprise to "combine" such disparate acts into a single, chargeable crime?
Some state laws do "upgrade" crimes, both misdemeanor --> felony and felony --> more serious felony based on prior convictions, but not (AFAIK) with multiple separate acts whose aggregate value is greater than the cutoff between petty theft and grand theft.
What's more, it's the local prosecutor who decides what charges to bring against someone accused of shoplifting, not the "Loss Prevention" team at a store or its corporate parent.
The idea just seems unlike how local/state laws and justice systems work in the US.
I could be (and likely am) wrong about this, but I've been unable to find state laws[0] which specify that multiple, separate acts of shoplifting can be combined into a single grand theft felony.
Would you share which states have such laws? It would be much appreciated!
[0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa... [1]
[1] See the bottom of the page for links to most US state laws.
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Trade Joe's maybe I could see but how did Whole Foods make this list?
> I would just assume every grocery store
Every large chain does.
> All those security cameras are there for a reason.
To show you that they can afford them. As if cameras are a reasonable way to stop shoplifting in the first place.
> As if cameras are a reasonable way to stop shoplifting in the first place.
How are they not?
They're pretty essentially both for catching a lot of shoplifting in the first place, as well as providing evidence in court.
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Whole Foods by me has a palm scanner, and the Amazon Fresh store does biometrics too (at least it used to?
The Whole Foods palm scanner is optional, though. I've never seen anyone use it.
You could always go to a Walmart and look up to see if they bothered to even wire the cameras or if the plug was literally dangling from the cameras over the entire store.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
Unfortunatelly this is incorrect. Do not be fooled by the decoys. They do it to customers, employees, and contractors.
Walmart was sued [0] for exactly what Wegmans just started in 2022,
Walmart is sued [1] by delivery drivers,
and, so on.
[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/privacy/bipa...
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/walm...
[2] https://caseguard.com/articles/retail-corporation-walmart-fa...
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Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
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They could also be hanging obvious decoys to lure the criminal-prone to action that the real, better hidden, ones capture
I would prefer they require face scanning vs. locking everything up. The police in my city don’t arrest people for shoplifting, or a range of petty crimes for that matter. If you don’t like face scanning no one makes you shop there.
When crime is unpunished and the police won’t do anything and the politicians don’t care, then businesses either have to adapt with new models or close
Police in my city are quite happy to lock people up for shoplifting. Random stores still lock up the majority of their inventory. I’m not sure how much that’s correlated.
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Kind of a strange stance from someone with the name "monero-xmr". If scanning everyone's face for the purpose of going after petty crimes is justified, why shouldn't it be illegal to use monero for the purpose of going after other crimes?
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These stores should just convert to a 19th century retail model and not allow customers to enter the stockroom.
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Or they could continue taking a small % of loss, remain wildly profitable and not abuse people.
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This is a false either/or.
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
December 2023: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret...
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Repeat shoplifters? Please that’s a thinly veiled excuse, the actual reason is so they can build more accurate analytical models to screw you over more.
I don't doubt that the biometrics analytics dystopia is coming, but shoplifting is a huge issue in some areas. Biometrics surveillance still sucks, but I'll believe it is about theft at this time.
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No, it’s the shoplifting. Don’t be obtuse.
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Screw you over, how, exactly?
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It's not only at groceries stores, it's everywhere. For example at TSA security line and (sometimes) when boarding flights at the gate. You can (and should) exercise your right to opt-out every single time, before that right is taken away. Omg I sound like Richard Stallman... anyway, he was right all along.
I used to always opt out at TSA checkpoints. Then I decided that of all places, the airport makes the most sense to use biometrics. I mean, a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent.
What scares me about TSA using it is that it normalizes its use. Next it's at stadiums. Then Wegmans. If it would stop at airports, then I would be okay with it.
> a human comparing my face to my ID is functionally equivalent
Not at all? A human isn't committing you to long term memory let alone entering a detailed sketch into a centralized database.
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Humans forget. The TSA allegedly deletes your photo, but they're quiet about the rest of the data they collected from that photo.
Make sure to opt-out before handing your ID over to the agent. They will claim you can no longer opt-out at that point, even before scanning. I had one plead to my wife to go through, because they are being watched by management and it wouldn't look good.
I always say I'm opting out as loudly as possible, many people don't even know that you can opt-out. The signs are often small and out sight.
What really annoys me is when I politely decline the facial scan of TSA, and the agent makes some snide comment about my picture on my identification or something. And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I'm pretty sure they're told some things to say. I overheard one telling someone the line about how it doesn't matter because there's cameras everywhere so you shouldn't opt out. Bizarrely, the agents seemed to be checking IDs manually that day!
>And the next time it happens that I get a smart ass comment like that, I'm going to politely ask him if that's his opinion or was he told to say that.
I get the temptation to do this, I really do, but I really don't recommend this. The TSA is in a position to make your day much worse. It's better just to opt-out and say nothing. Opting out is well within your rights (it's posted on the sign at the start of the line).
Follow instructions. Keep your mouth shut. Eyes forward. On your way.
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> Ask Wegmans directly to exclude you from facial recognition - Send an email to their privacy team
The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.
Kinda funny.
Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.
I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"
They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.
I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!
The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.
Good write up. Still I gotta say: a N95 mask will do the trick for cheap, with side bonus of also blocking flu & covid!
There are cameras (software, really) that can recognize you with a high degree of accuracy, despite you wearing a mask.
The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.
Well you could stand outside and hand out N95 masks to spread awareness. That isn’t doing nothing to fix the issue.
Why wouldn't they just do gait analysis?
Some places that would do face recognition would not do gait analysis, and so you defeat those. Additionally, if you prevent them from doing face recognition and they can do gait recognition, they will be forced to use gait recognition, which is likely more expensive or less reliable, which will limit their ability to do it in a widespread fashion or cost them more to do so.
Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.
Shoe stone.
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It’s unreliable and difficult. The most recent failure (made the news) was the laughable attempt to link the J6 bomber to a random police officer. Gait analysis belongs in the movies or maybe in some one-off national security investigation where nothing else is available.
prohibitively expensive
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Because that isn’t a thing.
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I don't see how you can enforce no face scanning if you allow security cameras.
Make it illegal. Give rewards for anonymous tips that lead to prosecution like it already exists for IRS tax fraud tips.
Americans will try anything to stop corporate wrongdoing--except making it illegal.
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That’s just not possible because it’s unenforceable at best and ignores the myriad ways around it “legally” that still would be workable even if it’s “illegal”
For example it’s illegal to hire foreign undocumented labor but in literally zero of the companies who have been raided recently the only people punished were the working people who are just trying to live
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I’m sure the current authoritarian government will get right on that.
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We haven't even tried to solve this any other way.
Pitting people against each other should be a last, last, last, resort.
Low trust is VERY expensive. It's asinine to introduce it to anywhere it doesn't already exist.
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If we define face scanning as specifically doing facial-recognition over multiple cameras, stores and/or time, then it's quite clear and simple.
A store could easily have security cameras operating without issue. They don't need to do any more smarts on it.
It's where you draw the line on smarts that's the thing.
- Person-shaped-object crossed from public-area to private area (eg through a staff-only door) without a corresponding door swipe event.
- Person-shaped-object appears to take an object off a shelf and put it in their bag/pocket.
- Specifically tracking a person over multiple cameras in one visit as they navigate the store, without associating with an identity
- Using facial recognition to recognise the same person over multiple visits/stores, and being able to track their activity over all of those visits.
There could be arguments for some of these being permitted without it being a total invasion of privacy.
I agree but unless the industry is forced they are not implementing this in a privacy friendly way. They rather collect as much data as possible.
Business Reform on YouTube has some tests and reviews of this kind of gear.
https://www.youtube.com/@businessreform/videos
I think we're far past the point where you can avoid being tracked anywhere in the world, and that's even if you wear sunglasses, a hat, and you use no technology (no phone, etc).
Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".
If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.
Maybe, but they're also incentivized to make people believe they are doing more than they are, and with higher accuracy, because it makes people give up entirely and make no effort to protect their privacy.
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How do I get Kroger to not scan my face? All these grocer companies are doing this same market analysis seemingly without giving good faith notice. I guess they are not legally required to inform their targets. It seems there needs to be some improvement in consumer protection laws. Dunnhumby and 84.51° are thick into this "taking".
I saw Adafruit and was anticipating a clever gadget announcement. Suppose some problems still need to solved the old fashioned way.
Low tech means accessible. A cowboy hat works better.
so even if you don't have your face scanned on the register, unless you're paying cash they'd still know who you are right? don't most people have passports? real ID is also a thing. if you're concerned about a hostile government wearing a mask at a grocery store isn't going to do anything sadly. not even counting things like gait analysis, security cameras or tracking your phone
Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).
personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.
- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do
https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-accuses-amazon-secretl...
> law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict,
Or, amazing life hack, don’t do crimes, on video or otherwise.
Not saying there are no privacy concerns, but I WANT this used in court against criminals
Do you agree that all current laws are just and correct, and are you confident that nobody will ever come into power who wants to make illegal something you believe is just and right to do?
I don't disagree, but I don't think private companies should be able to both keep videos indefinitely and for those videos to be accessible to the government for arbitrary goals.
I do pay cash. I don't have a passport. You can opt out of Real ID.
Anyways, the solution, as always, is noise. They leave their data pipelines open and assume all the data is mostly clean. There needs to be a massive technological development for the population to just clog those channels with so much noise they become effectively useless.
DDoS of the surveillance state.
Why does anyone need to opt out at all?
You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?
Getting punched in the face vs. walking into a private store that has a type of surveillance you disagree with are entirely different things...
These are not private stores. They are open to the public. This comes with several other requirements that a truly "private store" would not have to follow. There is a massive body of law which defines this.
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Mostly to make life a bit more annoying for the stores that try to implement this sort of thing- raising the cost to implement it.
This!
I fear people will just get used to it just like other means of mass surveillance then wonder why they're being harassed with petty pretexts based on this data.
This is already the case. The largest supermarket chain in my relatively wealthy area has had multiple cameras per aisle hanging about ~3 feet above your head + monitors in each aisle that show some, but not all, camera views, for over a decade now.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
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Harassed how?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-face...
This is one of the side effects of the shoplifting trends in recent years.
I don't think there is any alternative to this. I assume every corporation is filming me in their stores, building shopper profiles, that granularly identify me in every conceivable way. I am not surprised at all that Wegmans is taking a picture of my face. It's good to know, it's good for this to be in the news, but I can't imagine any grocery store, not taking advantage of video surveillance, profiling, all of that stuff if it will help them sell more.
FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
This is defeatist. You imply that local retailers are in on this as well, I know for a fact that my local co-op is not. Neither is the local farm stand or the local salvage grocery store. If you aren’t in a huge metro, shop local and you’ll do fine.
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
I want people to finally get mad enough that they do something about it instead of sitting here with half ass solutions and just bitching about it.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
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They always show me my total before the cars swipe, so as long as the obfuscation works until the card swipe, at least it would prevent dynamic pricing.
Dynamic pricing can’t be done legally in many states because prices on shelves have to match at checkout, and multiple people can see a label at once.
I mean that assumes that you can’t assign the highest price to non-facially recognized people.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
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Then, unless you use a different card each time you go
Or use one of the pool phone numbers. NPA-867-5309 is a common one.
What is the NPA for?
I meant bank card
Jenny left her number in your neighborhood too?
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I'll share this here now that I only drive EVs, but I suppose cashiers and random people at King Soopers(major grocer in Colorado, associated with Kroger's) would enter 555-555-5555 as their phone number for their rewards, and every time I would pump gas at their stations I would get $1/gallon off.
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Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
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We need a startup to make those super realistic face masks easy to make and use. Celebrities could license their faces to make up for movies and tv being AI generated.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
> I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
How does surveillance prevalent with online delivery services substantially differ from biometric ones?
> In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
This just doesn't make sense.
Are you asserting that people going into grocery stores now are more likely to commit theft due to those using online delivery services no longer engaging in on-premise shopping?
Or is it your premise that people who typically use online delivery services only go into grocery stores to steal?
Are you suggesting that a shift to online shopping led to a new demographic going to grocery stores in person? I would have expected that demographic would have went to grocery stores all along. What has changed that introduced a new demographic? And why does it mean security has to change?
Overall foot traffic is down in stores. People who shop online don't go to the store as often, and when they do they expect a worthwhile experience and to probably spend more. They're going to the grocery stores with the craft beer on tap, proper restaurants, etc. They know their online shopping is already monitored and cashless, so it's only a minor annoyance to see that in person. Not many are going to walk away just because of that. Those nicer stores are also in the wealthier neighborhoods where the expectation is safety while they spend extra time with the shiny new amenities in a smaller more peaceful crowd.
The people who avoid online and delivery may not have a choice and are more price sensitive or likely to shoplift, so those other stores also have to increase security.
I'm saying that people have become segregated. The suburbanite middle and upper classes don't "stop by on the way home from work" anymore and they aren't leaving home just to shop unless it's worth the hassle. They expect much higher levels of convenience and safety than ever before. Increased security everywhere makes sense.