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Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

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Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#321

Post by Grakel »

legerdemain wrote: post #274
hamburgerwah wrote: post #269

One 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?

Because Macy's is a dinosaur living in its last days.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#322

Post by vineyardmike »

oramit wrote: post #273
boatsie wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder this too, but perhaps your insurance company buys this data on you and says, oh, they drink sugary drinks and eat candy and chips. They are buying Tylenol and ibuprofen for chronic pain. Maybe they will get diabetes and we should raise their premiums accordingly.

I don't mean to rag on you in particular. The answers I get around privacy problems are always conjecture. "Perhaps" the insurance company will do x, "Maybe" they will do y. It's always some scary threat that could happen in the future. The problem is though that the powers that be (government/corporate) already have more private information than ever before and yet: nothing has happened. At what point do these warni…

Insurance companies DO buy data like this. It is not perhaps. They buy data about you that they do not use to your advantage. They have no interest in lowering your premiums and every interest in raising them.

One other example is the 2016 election and cambridge analytica. Not going to make a political case on the politicians, but the political parties (and foreign govs with interest in the outcome) bought data on electors to try and persuade them to vote for one candidate or the other. Or to make them think issue X is bigger deal than they previously did. People don't like to lose autonomy in politics and data is good for targeting and persuasion.

Of course, the big what-if is also worrisome. Maybe not to you, but to many. Some people are more concerned than others. If your of one minority religion, then you might worry if that religion gets targeted will gov buy data to identify individuals (eg china and Uyghurs or trump and his proposed list of muslums). Maybe your gay in a nation that isn't friendly to that. Its very easy to tell if someone is queer from mass collected data. That could be a concern if the gov starts looking for people.

Another less scary but not great what-if: Many govs (including some us govs) are doing more "pro-active policing" where they try to prevent crimes, often with biased data. Right now its pretty targeted at going to minority neighborhoods, but maybe one day it'll target underage people who buy alcohol paraphernalia to see if they drink underage. Minor crime oft-committed, but probably easy to identify from only grocery store purchase data - especially if you combine that with camera data (walk in/out with someone who buys booze while they buy solo cups). While the under-age drinking is a silly example, it uses pretty easily available data. Think of all the minor crimes people knowingly commit that no one actually cares to enforce. Now imagine what we could do if a computer can just spit out a list of names.

There are so many ways the data can be (ab)used and people come up with more every day.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#323

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #269

One 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…

> The second you walk into the store based on your face they can pull up your entire purchase history and contact. They are now crunching that data to improve retail layouts, marketing pitches, etc and there is growing market of selling aggregates of that data across merchants.

Super interesting, is there public information about this? Are you are saying they are using customer identity for sample weighting to debias and improve the precision of experiments?

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#324

Post by vineyardmike »

oramit wrote: post #279
JohnFen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purchasing history is some of the most personal and sensitive data there is about you. It can reveal nearly everything. But, ignoring that, there's a very good reason why you might want to keep as much data out of the machine as possible -- even data that, on its own, is of no importance. That reason is databases. The data you provide to any business will be combined with the data you've provided everywhere else. All…

Yes, all these disparate databases can be merged together and you can get a pretty darn accurate picture of me. But so what, what is the end game here?

> But so what, what is the end game here?

Police obviously love this data, and when its being traded in open market it is sold without a warrant. Laws change, if your a minority or in an oppressive country, data is scary.

In real terms for most white americans who don't break laws, the "slippery slope" (or shifting baseline) is already getting bad for end users. ..

I interviewed for a job at an insurance company. They said they offer a car plug in that tracks your car (to know if you're risky driver) to "offer discounts on good driving". They said in interview (not publicly) about 4% of people get discounts and the rest stay the same or go up. They gets tons of data on how people drive to tune their models. They also said that some neighborhoods are now considered more dangerous because they saw other drivers in their data being dangerous. Basically you now pay more because they know you live near other bad drivers, or bad drivers go to the grocery store near you, or whatever.

They also said (in 2018) they are working on an app to show you an id card (and track you in your car if you don't want their dongle). They're very interested in data on where you go and how you use your car, for obvious reasons.

I don't know if they do this, but they could easily buy data on where you shop to determine if the path from your home to the store has dangerous intersections that might raise your premiums. That is an easy use for grocery store data that will have clear downsides to most people.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#326

Post by pridkett »

missedthecue wrote: post #285
norov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not really fair. Until I start seeing Kroger going out of their way to support data provacy initiatives and consumer protections, correctly assume they have ill intent with your data.

What is the worst that could happen if Kroger learns that I use my rewards card to purchase a loaf of wonderbread and other assorted groceries every week?

You buy a pregnancy test and pre-natal vitamins. This information is sold and put together as part of a “profile”. Your employer buys these profiles, sees you’re pregnant and fires you because who wants to deal with maternity or paternity leave. You never told them you were pregnant, they can claim they didn’t know.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#327

Post by pixl97 »

missedthecue wrote: post #285
norov wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not really fair. Until I start seeing Kroger going out of their way to support data provacy initiatives and consumer protections, correctly assume they have ill intent with your data.

What is the worst that could happen if Kroger learns that I use my rewards card to purchase a loaf of wonderbread and other assorted groceries every week?

Selling it off to a data aggrigator that sells the information to the FBI so you get investigated for buying too much hummus after the next terrorist attack.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#328

Post by svachalek »

madeofpalk wrote: post #314
1MachineElf wrote: post #277

Earlier 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?

Well, making returns painful leads to less returns, to a certain logic. But it surely also leads to less sales, so I'm not sure which effect is greater.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#329

Post by legerdemain »

Sharlin wrote: post #318
unstatedAnswers wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer support is a cost center, so it gets less funding than sales/marketing-oriented projects (route-optimizing here likely has the intention of boosting sales, not necessarily reducing customer shopping time)

Yes. There’s a reason some of the most often needed groceries are almost always at the back of a supermarket.

Yes, because that's where the refrigerated warehouse is usually located: in the back of the store, to make it easier and cheaper to restock shelves from behind. By comparison, at least in the US, green groceries are almost never in the back of the store.

Re: Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

#330

Post by svachalek »

vineyardmike wrote: post #319
GuB-42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may actually close the class divide a little. The thing with privacy is the more wealthy you are, the more valuable it is. For example, if I want to sell something, I will want to target the wealthiest first. Same thing for scammers, and newspapers will follow celebrities. Who care about the poor, there is no money to extract from them. So let's get back to the private shopper. A rich and famous man will want to…

> The amount of privacy a rich man will get by paying $1000, a poor man can get it for $1 No, privacy is not autographs. Thats not how this works. The rich man is paying a private shopper to use the PS's face in the facial recognition system and card tracking system. the PS gets the ads, but not the rich man. The rich man's habits are still tracked (by proxy, assuming PS doesn't shop personally at same store). At bes…

It's called price segmentation. Make the same product available at multiple price tiers, but make the lower prices more time consuming and difficult to get. Clip a coupon, file a rebate, join a club. Then you get the best of both worlds, you extract a maximum price from well to do shoppers but have an optional price that still attracts the bargain hunters.
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