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Yep, those are stores I never go to.
You've never been to a CVS, Walgreens, or RiteAid?
Technically I go to a CVS pharmacy in a Target. RiteAids are not near where I live. And have been in Walgreens a few times.
Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
281–290 of 627 posts
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental. I think you're being paranoid.
The location where my car was parked was remote. There is no explanation for the proximity of his idling vehicle.
The remote parts of the car park are usually where the least desirable sorts hang out. (I park in the same areas due to an oversized vehicle, so notice them.)
I also think you're being paranoid.
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your experience, or your perception of it, clearly made you feel like you were the main character in a dystopian thriller - what's not to like?
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Damn dude you are a brave grizzled warrior battling demons, a lonely fighter against injustice (self checkout terminals) and I am duly chastened.
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#284Don't people dodge these cameras? When I used a credit card at home depot self checkout I was asked if I wanted to have the receipt sent to a specific email address I entered previously online. Creepy. So I started using cash only. Last year I went to get some low voltage wire. I walked for several aisles in both directions to find someone to open the cage. Not a soul. So I reached behind the cage and pulled it out,…
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Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK improving on poverty is a more effective approach.
Is there evidence of that? That seems to have been the prevailing view over the last many years, and it's not clear to me that it's improved anything. There seems to be more homeless camps, more petty crime, more drugs.
The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental. I think you're being paranoid.
The location where my car was parked was remote. There is no explanation for the proximity of his idling vehicle.
So you paid by cash and as a result home depot secretly called the cops on you, and the cops knew where you were parked and sent a car to passive aggressively harass you by parking nearby?
Maybe the cop was parked out of the way eating his lunch.
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#287Earlier 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…
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Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#288Earlier 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.
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In code, the manifestation of the buggy behavior is often quite some distance away from the underlying cause of the bug.
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, this is not the first time I've seen a discussion (mine and your comments) about racism downvoted on HN. It makes me question the crowd I'm attempting to mingle with, here. I get that the site is primarily concerned interesting tech-related things, but if anyone thinks that we can just avoid politics, social and economic issues that tend to surround those things once in awhile, they're delusional.
It’s a trope and easy to say but I do find the voting system in HN to have gone downhill over the years. It’s very similar to other social media sites. People are polarized about everything, if you have a different opinion, downvoted, if you have a response that might be factual but one of the professional posters here does not like it or you, downvoted. I will make a benign question and it will instantly get downvot…
I've experienced the same and have always been of the mind that voting systems on aggregate sites are anti-discussion and promote brigading. When people see a highly upvoted or downvoted comment, the tendency seems to be to follow the actions of those before you. Things quickly turn into an echo-chamber, although Reddit is admittedly more prone to that than HN, since it's divided into topic-specific subreddits.
Still, I'd be fine if the voting system were eliminated and threads were managed chronologically, keeping flagging for obvious rule violations, of course.
This is all, of course, tangential to the post at hand, but that's part of the beauty of it, in my opinion. Start on one topic, end up on something different.
Re: Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing. A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.
Lots of people in the US are religious. This generally doesn’t seem to dramatically lower crime on a statistical basis (with all kinds of caveats.)