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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

#331

Post by gs17 »

rovr138 wrote: post #185
stephen_g wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed at supermarkets here that of the dozens of times those 'you haven't scanned something' warnings have come up, only one time the item hadn't actually scanned when I thought it had. Every other time has been a false positive for me. They're pretty dodgy, the workers always seem pretty frustrated with it as they go around clearing them for people (sometimes a handful of people waiting, falsely accused by th…

The worst part for me is when they prevent you from scanning the same item twice. Yes, I want 2 boxes of cereal. I just find it easier to go to a cashier.

There's a smaller grocery store here where the self checkouts actually advertise that you can scan two things before putting them away (and you can!). It really should be standard.

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

#332

Post by closewith »

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…

> What do you mean "this just doesn't work"?

What I mean is that it doesn't work. Your proposal only increases crime, only deepens poverty, only worsens society.

> 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.

And yet, this policy has never worked. Three-stikes laws never work. Increased policing and more comprehensive criminal legislation never works. As long as the circumstances that caused the criminality persist, the problems returns ever more entrenched.

> It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.

You are correct that the poorest suffer the most. As a society, we should aim to eradicate the poverty. Anything short of that is symptom control.

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

#333

Post by bee_rider »

neilv wrote: post #76

I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks. The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up…

The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda “new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.

The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.

We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!

Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.

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

#334

Post by bevhill »

lightedman wrote: post #272
Maximus9000 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might fool the gait analysis, but they will come up with more metrics to analyze you by. You can't beat it. IMO, the only way to stop this is government

No, the only way to stop this is to simply get the CEOs arrested using the same technology they so desperately want to use. False positive their ass into a cell and I'll guarantee you this garbage will stop fast.

Most policy decisions should put people in prison, laws be damned. We have to reign in corporate overreach while we still have a government to do it with.

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

#335

Post by closewith »

randallsquared wrote: post #220
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…

> This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force. To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.

You're just plain wrong. You can enforce compliance - a police state - but it inevitably worsens outcomes for both people who commit crimes and their victims.

But that isn't a high-trust society. In fact a high trust society requires minimal formal policing by definition (and a _lot_ of informal policing by parents, families, friends, and communities).

High-trust societies aren't without their problems, too, as trust is regularly abused.

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

#336

Post by diggan »

justin66 wrote: post #252
octopoc wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do professional thieves shoplift? That's odd when you think about the risk/reward typically involved.

I think the name of the game is usually "Commit one crime at a time", so if you're sitting on stolen goods you haven't yet got rid of, then you don't go shoplifting :)

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

#337

Post by hollerith »

MisterTea wrote: post #269
neilv wrote: post #76

I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks. The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up…

> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security gua…

>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.

There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)

The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.

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

#339

Post by dml2135 »

neilv wrote: post #76

I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks. The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up…

Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.

IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

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

#340

Post by closewith »

gotoeleven wrote: post #231
bko wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Neither side of any political spectrum thinks that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Obviously if that was the goal, the easiest path is to remove laws and disband police. Instant crime rate drop.

But in fact both sides want to improve their societal outcomes and the policing/criminal policies that they support are by-and-large attempts to do that - improve society.

I'm neither left- nor right-wing in the US sense, but it is clear from examples around the world that high-trust societies emerge from the ground up and require strong family units, strong local communities, and strong engagement in larger politics.

While you do need police, you can't build communities by policing them. It's never worked anywhere.

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