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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

#511

Post by pixl97 »

adamrezich wrote: post #494
stickfigure wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happeni…

Your theory of urban/rural bifurcation is overly reductive. My city had a population of about 40,000 in the 70s (when guns were left in racks in the backs of trucks in the high school parking lot)—it's about twice that today. (I did however just return from visiting my wife's hometown in northern Idaho, which has a population of about 500, and indeed I did not feel the need to lock my car, despite keeping a firearm i…

40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.

Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.

Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.

In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.

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

#512

Post by ecshafer »

mothballed wrote: post #480
conradev wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will also go to jail. It’s not self-defense: https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-walgreens-manager-co...

That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.

Why don't people from SF also get a pejorative?

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

#513

Post by mothballed »

ecshafer wrote: post #512
mothballed wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.

Why don't people from SF also get a pejorative?

Because they are here to defend themselves.

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

#514

Post by underlipton »

llm_nerd wrote: post #367
no_wizard wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage theft is the largest form of theft in retail, out numbering shoplifting by a good margin. Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money

These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both? However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded . In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checko…

>Maybe we should have max enforcement in both?

You can't, resources are limited.

>Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded.

I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...

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

#515

Post by pixl97 »

mmmlinux wrote: post #479
criddell wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a good lawyer should be able to win. Evidence that shows a person picking something up on camera and then leaving the store without paying for anything doesn't feel all that strong.

Yeah i feel like there are exact same pictures when i buy something, if you happen to leave out the pictures from when i was standing in line and at the checkout. you could totally make it look like i stole stuff.

I mean, you could, but when walmart sees you walking out the door, they'll go trace your entire route and keep the film off of each of the cameras from entrance to exit of the store.

They tend to put up a very good prosecution.

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

#516

Post by jolmg »

ryandrake wrote: post #366
Izkata wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, self-checkout itself is faster here anyway. We don't have baggers, so in the cashier lanes you have to unload onto the conveyor and put your items into the bags yourself, with some awkward maneuvering since the register is between the conveyor and the bagging area. In self-checkout unloading and bagging is combined into one action: Lift item from cart, pass over scanner on the way to the bags, place in bag, and…

I think self check-out is only faster if you compare it to really, really slow checkout clerks with no dedicated bagger. I've been in grocery stores with fantastic checkout staff where 100 items were checked out and bagged in a minute and a half. Ain't no way I'm going to achieve that rate standing by myself there over a tiny kiosk where I need to find a bag, put every item into bags before scanning the next one.

They don't make a race of it, but I think they go at a reasonable "marathon" pace. There are also dedicated baggers. I should note that cashiers also accommodate other services like paying utility bills, or making withdrawals from one's checking account.

It's not just about speed, though, it's particularly about the unified lane and the fact that 2 self-checkout stations easily fit in the space of a single human cashier station (that may be unoccupied because of a store's hiring budget). It's also about peoples' patience. If a store hires less cashiers and enough people are still willing to wait in line such that there's profit, well...

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

#517

Post by wat10000 »

MisterTea wrote: post #470
adamrezich wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable. When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at…

> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken. I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear le…

I think it’s the news.

Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.

But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.

This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.

People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.

Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.

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

#518

Post by llm_nerd »

underlipton wrote: post #514
llm_nerd wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both? However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded . In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checko…

>Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? You can't, resources are limited. >Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels. https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...

>You can't, resources are limited.

Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

>Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...

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

#519

Post by pixl97 »

fluoridation wrote: post #59
widforss wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is essentially the exact point system used for traffic infractions in many countries over the world. Driving 10 km/h above the speed limit? No biggie, you pay a fine. Do it three times? We take your license.

No, not "do it three times". "Get fined for it three times." That's the key difference; there's feedback from the system that's supposed to act as a corrective. What's being discussed here would be taking away someone's license sight unseen, with no previous lesser punishment having been administered.

I mean, if they walked out with a felony amount of stuff the first time the system would have tossed them directly in jail.

I can understand why the stores will do it this way. Each prosecution is very expensive. If you're going to go though the effort with the legal system bring a case that stops the culprit. More so, doing this tends to scare the hell out of people that think they've gotten away with something. Kinda like the thievery version of the Santa Claus song.

"Walmart knows when you are sleeping. Walmart knows when your away, Walmart knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake".

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

#520

Post by godelski »

valleyer wrote: post #429
nomdep wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal... Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

No. Overstaying a visa or not leaving when temporary protected status is suddenly revoked (or asylum is not granted) is not a criminal offense under US federal law.

Technically it is all about status since a visa is about entry. Like the date on your visa is the window you have to enter the country but you'd have an I-94 or some status forum that dictates the parameters of your stay. (though yeah, everyone just calls this "overstaying your visa") (IANAL but have travel abroad before and well... I was in grad school and conversations about visa and status come up a lot when the majority of students have temporary status and there's a president talking about changing the rules)
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