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Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

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Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#221

Post by npteljes »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #202
npteljes wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not do the same with a cashier? (This is getting tangential, but I do exactly what you describe, and I really appreciate that I can do it on my terms, without having to accommodate three other people: the one in front of me, the cashier, and the one next in line.)

I was thinking of Costco, where loads are big and they do a good part of it for you, except for the smaller stuff.

Ah, I see. I don't live in the US, so I never experienced that. In Hungary, there is zero service, the cashier sits behind a counter, the shopper unloads everything to a conveyor, cashier beeps every item, shopper puts them back into their cart. For heavy items, the cashier comes out with a portable beeper, and does the job with that. And now with self-service, it's on the shopper to do the exact same.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#222

Post by mattlondon »

fercircularbuf wrote: post #165
kjkjadksj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shoplifters don’t care. Look at any hardware section at homedepot. Half the bags are ripped open. Try and find some stock they say is there online. Its not it already got stolen. The registers is not where they need to be combatting theft. It is everywhere else in that store.

As someone living in Japan, the sheer number of instances of theft in your description shocks me. Is this that common there?

Often happens in the UK for things like bags of screws or bathroom/plumbing fittings.

The charitable view is someone is opening the packaging to e.g. make sure that the thread is the right size (in the UK especially we suffer from annoying mixture of old legacy imperial measurement era pipes/threads/etc as well as metric).

The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the bit they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#223

Post by darkwater »

hopelite wrote: post #194
4ggr0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was repeatedly told to target black women not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.

[flagged]

This is going nowhere in any case but maybe at very, very least use a whole programming language as an example. Like, if you use JavaScript you are going to find more bugs because someone made up some unscientific figure about ratio of bugs per computer language.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#224

Post by dahcryn »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #186
anewonenow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that in many states now prosecutors refuse to prosecute for crimes under a certain threshold, cops often won’t even bother taking a report. A year ago my wallet was stolen. The guy went on a shopping spree until my cc companies started denying charges. In each store he made sure to spend less than $500, so individually there was no crime worth reporting. I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik th…

I doubt it has anything to do with "progressive". It has to do with limited resources and spending them where they think they will do the most good.

but it's been proven time and time again, that any form of fraud of theft, leads to at least 3x more in the future.

If they get away with it, they never stop, and just keep stealing more and more. Most never hit any repercussions. Yet in amount of actual numbers of people committing those acts, it's a very small number compared to the number of thefts.

So stopping it early is just smarter. Better to stop someone stealing 250 euro, rather than wait a year, let that same person steal more and more, just until they steal 5000 euro and it's worth it to prosecute. It's still the same person, same amount of effort. Just more damage to society.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#225

Post by mnw21cam »

unwind wrote: post #130
bob1029 wrote: post #123

I've noticed cameras in the payment terminals at some Kroger stores lately. All checkout lanes, not just self-checkout. Also, the HD nearest me has no fewer than 10 ALPRs in their parking lot. They've made absolutely sure that you're gonna get into the database.

ALPR = Automatic License-Plate Recognition [1] for those not familiar with the acronym. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

The more conventional acronym is ANPR.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#226

Post by UncleMeat »

RugnirViking wrote: post #158
closewith wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law. This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force. > I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account. The irony here is…

> A high-trust society cannot be built by force. Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible. You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low. Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet…

It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#227

Post by UncleMeat »

bko wrote: post #181
closewith wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law. This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force. > I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account. The irony here is…

What do you mean "this just doesn't work"? You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us. For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%. You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out…

> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.

Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#228

Post by dahcryn »

mattlondon wrote: post #210

The people at the checkouts are typically not the ones stealing things. There is a bit of a spate here in the UK where just walk in, literally empty shelves into bags and walk out. Some security guards or assistants try to intervene, but apparently some security guards (e.g. ones at apple stores) are told not to try and intervene so really what's the point? The plot twist for this though is that the police are increa…

you'd be surprised how many people steal small valuable items and hide it by doing normal shopping and having a normal shopping cart for their other items.

That expensive 30 dollar bottle of shampoo for example, in the handbag, and just checkout the other items like normal.

I worked at a place where we could easily track people through the store. Not ID them, but if at any point we clicked on a person, and we could see from entering the store until exiting the store everywhere they passed. shoplifting is super easy to prove after the fact, just hard to do whilst they are still in the store

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#229

Post by UltraSane »

doctor_radium wrote: post #219
UltraSane wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What store? I have not seen a single store with this setup.

I believe some Kohls, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, and Dollar General stores do it.

Yep, those are stores I never go to.

Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

#230

Post by dahcryn »

saubeidl wrote: post #138

I am of the firm opinion that if big corps want to outsource their labor to me, the customer, then it is my right to treat myself to a few free items here and there as compensation for the work being done. If you don't want that to happen, give cashiers their jobs back, you greedy bastards.

your compensation is speed, you get to go home faster. Is that not enough?
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