If this comes to my country I'll be shopping with a balaclava
Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
331–340 of 369 posts
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the phone number in your bio you appear to be based in chicago, is there a reason you are so worried about gov tracking but put your real name and phone number in your bio? This just seems like all incredibly inconvenient as a training exercise but I can't think of real reason someone on hn would do this only to make it very easy to ID them in other ways.
That's likely a burner number. sneak's website states that he is out of Berlin. He got ya!
...my SIM card is an SF number, my mailing address is in Manhattan, my domain name ends in .berlin, and I'm in precisely zero of the cities listed in this thread right now. ;)
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing this is why many grocery stores don't allow NFC payments, except for (in my area at least) Safeway, whose non-club pricing is so punitive that most people just knuckle under and get the card. Though I just use 867-5309 anyway. Works in every area code, AFAICT.
I was at a self-checkout recently that required a store rewards membership to checkout at. I tried 867-5309 but form validation required both a phone number and a last name. I guess retailers are catching on.
Can you not just make a fake account?
That David Smithee sure does buy a lot of stuff all over the UK :D .
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you buy at a grocery store can reveal a lot about you: - Personal care products: gender - Medications: age/health of you and family members - Magazines/media: political affiliation, social class The list goes on. [Edit: formatting]
Yes, you can infer a lot based on grocery store purchases. I don't deny it - but why does it matter? What bad things have happened to the average person based on grocery store purchase history? Again, i'm not trying to be flippant with my questions I'm honestly just frustrated after decades of following privacy discussions that there isn't a clear answer to this question.
Imagine if the data falls in the wrong hands. Wrong as in completely crazy and unreasonably wrong, which might be difficult to imagine, but think about what's currently happening in Afghanistan - rebels have now taken over the country and can do as they wish, and I bet they would be happy to use past purchase data to retroactively punish people who bought the "wrong" things in the past if such data collection systems were in use there.
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
okay... i'll bite: how does one use a card online without providing phone or email?
I don't know if this actually makes things better or worse - I do it in the hope I can shut down spam by removing a compromised address - but I try very hard to use a different email address for every business I purchase from. You don't always have to provide a phone number, either. Most of the time yes, but I don't think the phone number is actually required to complete a credit card transaction. There also used to…
There's this one:
Apple Card does as well (and Apple Pay in general with any other card).
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#336One other thing people may not realize. If you use your credit card at a merchant online or in person and you associate any information such as a telephone number or email with that card. Any time you use that card, online or off, to make a purchase with that merchant those transactions can be tied together regardless of whether you provide your email/phone on future transactions. Large vendors such as walmart etc no…
Then why does it take the sales person at Macy's 15 minutes to look up my order before giving up and just giving me a refund for a poorly fitting sweater I brought back?
I think the ultimate cause of this kind of inconsistency is that the panopticon-style correlation of customer data is happening offline in a business intelligence system that has a one-way, stale data feed from various ETLs, while making a return happens in an online system that doesn't get anything back from the analytics system (because the analytics data is too loosely structured and low-quality to feed it back into a line of business system).
This kind of dichotomy exists in just about any organization that gets into BI/data science/whatever you want to call it, and it can be absolutely maddening. The state of ETLs and analytics systems, for example, means that we have basically gone back to "overnight batch processing" and a lot of reporting data only becomes available the day after the transaction, since all the ETLs need to run and then whatever analytics system, data-cube assembly or etc. But since the analytics system exists, it is taken as good enough and no one wants to re-implement the functionality in an online, system-of-record fashion.
Or another way to put it: the GP says "The second you walk into the store based on your face they can pull up your entire purchase history and contact." That's being pretty generous... most of the time they don't know any of that until an hour or a day later, because it comes from multiple disparate systems (and outside vendors) and importing that data into a data warehouse (in batches) and then correlating it later is far easier to implement, and the dominant method used in this kind of analytics.
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Macy's, the 15 minutes you were forced to spend inside the store is a feature, not a bug.
Is it? That's 15 minutes of a customer not spending money, and 15 minutes of a staff person dedicated to giving back money to a customer, rather than generating more revenue. I get that its considered a feature to get them into a store, but surely you don't want to optimise for associates not selling things?
>Is it? That's 15 minutes of a customer not spending money, and 15 minutes of a staff person dedicated to giving back money to a customer, rather than generating more revenue.
That would be true if the customer service area was isolated inside an empty boring room, but at Macy's, it's out in the open on the store floor and surrounded by merchandise. Waiting in a boring line means eyes that wander to adjacent displays and stands.
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if they don't actually lower prices, but use your purchase history to learn what gets you to spend more money?
In Canada, 'price discrimination' is a criminal offence. Cuz you know, if something is anti-consumer and impacts rich people, strong laws will be written against it. But there's many ways around it.
When has anything so trivial as legality bothered multinationals?
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's on a store-by-store basis. My grandfather works at a Wal-Mart in a small town with a large minority population and said they average 10-12K in merchandise stolen each month. The store is open 24 hours, but they still only have 1 security guard working 9-5 because they'd lose more money from lost sales due to minority groups typically having bad experiences with authority figures and avoiding the store.
$12,000 a month? That's almost nothing for a store like Walmart.
Nothing only if the other stores subsidize that particular store. In reality they will just close unprofitable stores.
Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing this is why many grocery stores don't allow NFC payments, except for (in my area at least) Safeway, whose non-club pricing is so punitive that most people just knuckle under and get the card. Though I just use 867-5309 anyway. Works in every area code, AFAICT.
I was at a self-checkout recently that required a store rewards membership to checkout at. I tried 867-5309 but form validation required both a phone number and a last name. I guess retailers are catching on.
I know it's not exactly a last name, but... did you try the "standard" name for that number? I can't imagine nobody else thought of signing up like that, so unless the store explicitly blacklisted certain numbers, I'd think it worth a shot.