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Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

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Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#31

I think the courts have ruled that it is perfectly legal to record somebody outside of their home as that is considered public spaces. Many cities are now moving to embed cameras in street lights to deter and record crimes. I think that it is safe to assume that if you are outside, you are being recorded, either by a check point camera , a store’s security camera , streetlight camera or even your neighbor’s ring devi…

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Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#32
post #24

I don’t see the actual harm here. Malls have operated security cameras for decades. These people added a facial recognition system to generate population statistics (age, gender) and track anonymous individuals as they move around the mall. So what? Who was harmed? Who could be harmed?

I imagine they used this to also serve up suggestions on the kiosk. Mens vs Womens, Bongs vs. Bath linens, etc.

the NYC subway system has big human sized iphone like map displays complete with a facetime camera, presumably capturing the same stuff.

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#33
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, if you don't like what your local shopping mall is doing, build your own!

Or even better, stop patronizing it and contribute to its crumbling real estate value.

Though, the more malls decline, the more they will behave like this. Optimizing and squeezing more out of their shrinking value.

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada, do you even really have a right to privacy when in public spaces like a shopping mall? Is there even a legal expectation that there aren't cameras doing this kind of thing all the time? In most places in the US I know there isn't a right to privacy within a public space. If I as a shop owner put up security cameras in this same fashion in most of the US this wouldn't be against the law. There's no law prev…

A lack of a law preventing it doesn't make it good though. We can add new laws and regulations

Are the kinds who people who "shop" and attend "malls" the sorts of people we should be protecting?

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#36
post #25

I think the courts have ruled that it is perfectly legal to record somebody outside of their home as that is considered public spaces. Many cities are now moving to embed cameras in street lights to deter and record crimes. I think that it is safe to assume that if you are outside, you are being recorded, either by a check point camera , a store’s security camera , streetlight camera or even your neighbor’s ring devi…

I don't know why this is downvoted. I thought the same thing. "Shoppers had no reason to expect their image was being collected by an inconspicuous camera, or that it would be used, with facial recognition technology, for analysis," said federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien in a statement. My default is the opposite, I expect I'm being tracked all the time and that my image, cell signal, and whatever else is…

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Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#37
post #34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lack of a law preventing it doesn't make it good though. We can add new laws and regulations

Are the kinds who people who "shop" and attend "malls" the sorts of people we should be protecting?

Are you saying we shouldn't protect consumers?

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#38
post #28

The system is apparently tracking age and gender of people visiting the information kiosk. This hardly seems like invasive tracking. Even tracking an individual's movement through the mall with the purpose of providing security and marketing analysis seems like a ho-hum no big deal to me. If they were then taking the data and finding those people through Ring or youtube videos, sharing the pictures of people with com…

its very similar to what a company called Locarise do in Japan. It's not identifying anyone, merely seeing buyer hotspots, queues, recording visitor numbers, etc. All very valuable to a mall and imo quite harmless to the user if they are not identified

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#39
post #34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lack of a law preventing it doesn't make it good though. We can add new laws and regulations

Are the kinds who people who "shop" and attend "malls" the sorts of people we should be protecting?

What kind of question is this? Are you intending to imply that some people are less deserving of privacy purely based on if they shop at malls?

Re: Mall real estate company collected 5M images of shoppers

#40
post #13

>The company also argued shoppers were made aware of the activity through decals it had placed on shopping mall entry doors that referred to Cadillac Fairview's privacy policy. Do what now? Physical spaces have privacy policies? We're really sleepwalking into a dystopia. If you don't like the privacy policy of your shopping mall, you're free to shop... online, where they get even more behavioral data on you. Yikes.

> shoppers were made aware of the activity through decals Indeed there's a huge glaring problem here: many of these malls have branded entrances (Shoppers Drug Mart, Best Buy, etc) through which a large portion of consumers walk into the mall, and these alleged decals are not present in those entrances. Here's an example [1]. Frankly I don't see said decals even in the non-branded entrances[2] They're going to have a…

The decals might be installed on the inside doors that lead from shoppers drug Mart to the the mall.
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