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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

#231
post #181

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…

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

#232
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure we should allow such premeditated charge stacking, it is just further weaponizing the law and fueling our prison industrial complex for zero gain to society. Who is to say many of those people wouldn't have stopped after being caught and charged the first time? Imagine if cops sat on the side of the road not pulling people over, just recording minor traffic offenses in a file, and then a year or so later…

Seems like proper punishment is only way to get deterrent effect. Or the courts to do their job. So to me this sounds like workable way, stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.

>stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.

I'm not sure if you have been to an American jail but they do not set folks on the straight path. They are basically Crime University, and the folks on the inside trade all kinds of information about how to crime more effectively, where to crime, what tactics police use and what neighborhoods are safest or most dangerous for police activity.

I was thrown in lockup for a weekend for not changing my tags after moving and letting it escalate out of control and what I saw in that inner city lockup truly shocked me. Folks had incredible amounts of illegal goods on them (despite having been searched and thrown in jail) and were openly performing transactions, sharing "industry secrets" and coordinating for future work once they were out.

If you have spent any time in an American jail or prison, I think you would be disabused of the notion that you can simply lock a criminal up for a few months and "fix" them. I would suggest that it's the opposite, a few months in jail turns a newbie criminal into a true amateur or journeyman with networking, education and future opportunities.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.

Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.

Gut feelings are also highly effective as tools to direct policy.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.

Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.

Anecdotally, I had a Hispanic friend once who had been a professional thief (not when I knew him but before). His grandfather had won the lottery so he had a guaranteed income, but he did it for fun and because that’s what the cool people did.

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

#235

I make it a point not to use self-checkout systems because I want to support human interaction even if basic, and contribute to jobs for humans. And cash (most self-checkouts here are card-only). I understand it’s a losing battle on all fronts.

Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out. You don’t want to pay people to do that and put yourself in a higher theft situation, then you haggle the customer even more by treating them like a criminal. I had one of these happen at a self checkout the other day where the system did object tracking an…

> Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.

I've seen this sentiment in recent years, but with respect to time, self-checkout was always faster than human cashiers. You didn't need to wait while the cashiers did procedures like counting the money in the drawer and waiting for a supervisor to sign-off on it. The lines were unified so that your line was served by 4-8 checkouts rather than 1 cashier (or 2 as is the case with walmart). That meant that any issue with a particular customer e.g. arguing over pricing presented on the shelf vs on the system, needing to send someone out to verify the shelf, didn't affect the time you needed to wait as much. They were a very positive thing for customers when they were introduced.

Basically, instead of having to get in a line of 3-6 people and having to wait for each of those to be served before you by one cashier, you just instantly check-out with usually no line.

With respect to labor, it's basically the same. That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.

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

#236
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatever is more conventional depends on the convention for whatever the plate is called in the respective location.

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

#237
Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off.

Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?

Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.

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

#238
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me. Not self checkout related, but the Kroger stores by me have all started having security guards check receipts before you can leave the store. They do this whether or not you do self checkout. Accordingly, I have stopped patronizing those stores because I refuse to spend my m…

Not sure what state you're in, but in most places you can just walk by then with zero legal issues (excluding contractual obligations like costco)

I was going to say, at the point they aren't letting you out the door, aren't they committing false imprisonment?

Besides, most places nowadays you have to explicitly ask for a receipt or press extra buttons within a 5-second time window to get one.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it rich people in the homeless camps?

Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness. The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s r…

The weight of evidence is abundantly clear that the most effective way to reduce interpersonal crime is by reducing poverty, and providing housing & healthcare to everyone. Relatively modest sincere funding of these programs can have a huge impact, and if you had mentioned some of these "other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems" I might even be able to point to some for you.

Wanting an increase in carceral solutions despite the weight of evidence against their effectiveness is exactly the "irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma" you're railing against. It doesn't feel fair to a certain worldview to allocate resources in this way. But you need to get over that, because it is what works.

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

#240

Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off. Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the n…

> live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress"

That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.

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