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 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-...
Each year, there are over a million arrests for shoplifting in the United States (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2019),
See also Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft (2024) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth...
In NYC before Covid, I never saw it. After, many many times.
You don't have to try to physically stop them the moment they walk out, when there isn't time to call the police and you don't want a cashier getting physically involved and there's no security officer at the moment.
You have the evidence, and can call the cops the next time they enter the store.
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.
> "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-...
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.
The data shouldn't exist in the first place, and neither should surveilled society.
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.
Also, consider someone stealing small amounts over a year from a single store, a chain of stores or a group of stores with the same owners. The victims in these cases are the same entity.
That said, the trend in my area is for business owners to share data about accused shoplifters, help law enforcement with investigations, etc. I would not be surprised if they're all using a platform to do this these days.
See also:
- https://legalclarity.org/do-stores-build-cases-on-shoplifter...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/organized-retail-crime-nine-...
- https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/12/30/new-in-2025-cracking-down-...
- https://www.davisfirmllc.com/blog/the-retail-theft-aggregati...
- https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/monica...
Also, you don't want to criminalize the person who stole one small thing vs serial shoplifter.
Actually, this was already addressed (n.b., aggregation laws only exist in nine states, see GP's link here[1]) in most places by an increase in the severity of the crime charged for folks being convicted multiple times. cf. Alabama's law[0] as an example:
Enhanced Penalties for Theft Convictions in Alabama
Alabama law increases the penalties for habitual (repeat) felony offenders.
The length of the enhanced penalty depends on the number of past convictions
and the felony offense level for the current offense.
Second felony. For a second felony conviction, the sentence is raised one
level—for instance, a class B felony increases to a class A felony. This
penalty increase applies only to current offenses classified as class A, B,
or C felonies.
Third felony. A person with two prior felony offenses faces the following
minimum prison terms: 10 years for a class C felony, 15 years for a class B
felony, and 99 years for a class A felony.
Fourth felony. A fourth felony offense results in minimum prison terms of 15
years for a class C felony, 20 years for a class B felony, and life for a
class A felony.
Class D felony with prior convictions. When the current offense is a class D
felony and the person has two or more class A or B felony convictions or
three or more felonies in general, the penalty increases to a Class C felony.
(Ala. Code § 13A-5-9 (2024).)
[0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/organized-retail-crime-nine-...
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.
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.
Not all crimes. But many crimes.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
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...
The store I worked at was also a shitshow that barely operated so maybe I was just in their local minimum.
Kroger had this too, which made every shopping trip take dramatically longer because the employees would already take 5-10 minutes to come over when they didn't have to reset every self-checkout every other item.
I refuse to shop anywhere that has them. We already have to deal with the constant "Please place item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in the bagging area.", why do we need extra aggravation when it's only going to slightly slow down a very specific class of shoplifter?
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
XMR is not illegal to use or own, shoplifting is.
The bad thing about mafia enforcement is you don’t get civil rights. Oh, and if the mob boss wants a favor then you’re going to have to oblige, even if it puts you at risk.
If police and DAs don’t take their jobs seriously, this is what they are inviting back into society.
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...
These cases are both minor and hard to prosecute.
The difference isn’t enforcement, it’s demand. The retail model as it stands today wasn’t designed for a world where there is a global market for everything. 95% people are honest, and most dishonest people are disorganized and easy to deter.
If you were to raid a drug store in 1986, your ability to unload stolen toothpaste and hair spray was pretty limited - maybe some mafias had a network of bodegas or independent stores.
Today, you have a major corporation that prides itself at having the “world‘s largest selection”. It’s also the worlds largest fence — Amazon.
Police: "You've caught them red-handed on camera, but we're very busy and we don't care. Or perhaps this is a place where we're deliberately doing-nothing as a revenge or pressure-tactic against local politicians."
Shopkeeper: "Ah, but this time I have the camera-footage and fancy biometrics of everyone in the store!"
Police: "Oh, well why didn't you say so? That completely changes things, we're always willing to help out a fellow biometrics fan."
Why not? If the police are frustrated that the DAs aren’t doing their job, I don’t think it helps the police any to choose to also not do their job. Especially since DAs are often elected, which means it’s easier to replace them if the police can show that they (the DA) are the bottleneck. But if the police don’t do their job first, then the police are the bottleneck.
Then how do things work on the streets in NYC?
Perhaps some differences in level of power?
Perhaps some differences in the degree to which police are willing to bend over backward for them, vs blowing them off?
But I wish that the stress of living in a panopticon would be argument enough.
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.
Not at all? A human isn't committing you to long term memory let alone entering a detailed sketch into a centralized database.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequently-asked-questions/does-t...
But that's just generous reading, anyway. There are so many ambiguities that it's not really worth the trouble to attempt any rigorous analysis of it.
"In rare instances TSA will collect and temporarily retain photos and data..." How rare? Doesn't matter: then what happens?
"...data collection mode events are limited in time and place..." Damn unrelenting spacetime.
"TSA’s facial comparison technologies adhere to DHS and TSA cybersecurity requirements." Restatement of the problem.
The last I read the SORN for TSA’s facial recognition, they did commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours.
CBP operates their facial recognition under a different SORN, and there are many more caveats, although they also commit to deleting identifiable data within 24 hours for US citizens (only).
That was in late 2024 anyway.
If we want to be truly generous in interpreting it, the new sample would be deleted and the comparison is done against the photos they have on file from your ID/passport (although, since a foreigner can do it on their first visit to the US, it might just be based on scanning the document you provide). Of course, single-sample-per-person facial recognition is pretty limited, but it's security theater anyways.
The cat's out of the bag, anyway. They already have a perfect dataset and surveillance mechanism. But it'd be nice to stop continuing to perfect it.
Yes, they could be lying. That would be illegal.
The entire scheme has a very high abuse potential. Equipment and personnel set up at major ports and their presence normalized. Turnkey authoritarianism at its finest.
Were they lying? Possibly. But this is not a matter of them trying to use weasel wording to trick you into thinking they're claiming something they're not.
Moreover, it was put forward as proof that they don't keep the data, but the source is actually called "Does TSA protect all data (e.g., photos) collected." What are they protecting if they don't have it? What would be the point of even doing this if they don't collect it?
But leave that aside and let's talk about your experience. Did it say the data would be deleted after 24 hours or did it say it would be deleted after use? What is use? Use could be we're operating a giant biometric database and we intend to keep doing it until the asteroid, and why wouldn't it be that?
I'm not attempting to defend the TSA; I think they're reprehensible. I wish merely to provide new facts into the discussion.
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.
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.
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 may not be an issue for you at the moment, but outright dismissal will not keep you safe.
The post I replied to implied that gait analysis is a viable alternative option. Gait analysis is not an option today, or this year, or even in the next decade. There is no data supporting the claim that it can be done reliably enough to get down to practical reidentification use cases.
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
They take your money so that you can be compliant with the Kafkaesque language of the law, such that you can continue to do what you wanna do, but now you’re actually protected under the law with a specific proviso through this new middleman.
And so that’s when you get industry groups lobby in Congress to say we need to do this without the other at the federal level.
There’s no way you’re gonna be able to actually figure this out because laws don’t work to protect citizens, laws are intended to protect business interests. Like that is unambiguous and undisputed at this point.
Surveillance consumerism IS the economy
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.
There needs to be protections and incentives for, for example, low level employees to report their employers when they're privy to them breaking the law.
I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
I agree. I'm not sure making the employer-employee relationship worse to prevent it actually makes it better though. Every retail company is doing some amount of security stuff that's adjacent to this even if they're being tasteful.
Can we try "just" making it like normal levels of illegal before we make the employer-employee relationship dynamic worse in any workplace where data that could be used in this way is at all relevant?
I dare you to explain how without using a) an example where in the absence of law trust would not also be breached b) claiming the tipster's trust is breached because they inherit that breach through the N levels of government above them until you get to a level that both the narc and the IRS inherit from c) making some assertion that would create either insanity or hilarity if used to reason about other mundane illegality (e.g bringing some personal weed through a non legal state).
Also the cash under the table workforce is alive and well wheras the mail order drugs industry goes through great pains to structure itself and engage in opsec such that trust is not needed. That would seem to indicated that tax evasion is not inherently a breach of trust.
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.
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.
The irony of being fingerprinted to read a blog about fingerprinting is apparently lost on Adafruit.
if you’ve got ideas or want to help us test better solutions, we’re totally open — reach out.
and what's that? oh right! we’re one of the few sites that still respects do not track — and always have.
full text is available via rss (no js, no cookies): https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
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...
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
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.
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?
If you disagree, you can choose to shop somewhere else. It's literally that simple.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
They literally have nothing better to do so this, traffic enforcement and bothering kids who are trying to have a good time are the bulk of their duty, so I'd agree.
> It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I think a certain kind of person is comforted by surveillance. They perceive it, usually somewhat correctly from places of immense privilege, to be for their benefit and protection. They idea that it would be used against them, who are Good, and not against those people, who are Bad, is laughable to them if the concept even crosses their minds.
Maybe you're one of those people if the cameras bother you, is the sentiment.
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
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
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
If you really want people to fight, it’s better to use fighting words, to cheer on allies who are fighting, or to give examples of how you have successfully fought back. This also counters attempts at demoralization.
Shit’s gonna have to get really really bad really really quickly for anybody to actually seriously mobilize against the reality of the insanity that you live inside.
It’s just so fundamentally corrupt and broken at every possible level
Anyone suggesting that we need some kind of relatively small skin procedure when the patient has stage four skin cancer is still living in a dream world
If people feel demoralized it’s because they can’t generate the rage necessary to turn information into physical action
If someone is overwhelmed by it then that is a indictment that should give people pause and ask “why is my response to fear to freeze fawn or flight instead of fight”
Ultimately if the plurality of humans roll over and die when encountered with overwhelming force, then so be it and that’s the result, and they will go the way of Neanderthal
If people are not enraged then they are being intentionally ignorant and ultimately theres nothing to save
Ultimately your position boils down to “I would rather lose than alter my tactics because humans don’t behave as I’d like them to.” Your opponents will happily oblige you.
To quote carlin: The public sucks
If the citizen is so devoid of capabilities that it can be manipulated into killing itself then the citizen does not have what it takes to survive
My hope is that people wake up but I do not have any confidence that that is actually going to happen, as I stated
You use the word “mocking” but it’s inappropriate here - a better word to use would be “challenging” or “agitating.”
Ultimately if my life is surrounded by a bunch of robots who can do all the things that are necessary in order to move the epistemological foundations of reality forward that’s more than I could say for any collection of humans.
After over 40 years of experience as a human I can tell you definitively the humans are the number one problem in the world.
Right now the demotivators are winning.
We know that command economies don’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that formal hierarchies don’t work so that’s not a solution
Have any solutions?
Humans can only really coherently plan at the global scale required on the order of months into the future
However our activities, even at the individual level (burning a tire for example) have extreme impacts and costs on extant populations globally and future populations.
It’s like we completely stopped talking about climate change and how the ecological collapse is about to punch everybody in the throat.
This is a mathematical formula that does not have a solution
The only possible solution is to change the properties of the atomic unit which is individual human actor
Since we cannot change the foundational biology of humanity then there is a impossible to solve problem here if there is a desire to retain the human element in the future. I stopped desiring a human future about 30 years ago because it makes no sense.
The biological limitations of the human species is now the single weakest link of all possible futures.
That was not true before (insert your preferred period, upper paleolithic, neolithic, industrial revolution etc…) but has only been accelerating since.
Unless some absolutely foundational things change, like the foundational functioning of human systems, then we will continue this cycle of destruction forever.
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.
Or use one of the pool phone numbers. NPA-867-5309 is a common one.
- this has worked for me in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
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?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
In other words, how would a merchant be able to establish a specific $20 USD bill was used by a specific person?
No bank would share this information with an entity other than law enforcement and likely would require a court ordered subpoena to do so.
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.
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?
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.