alt Hacker NewsFighting back against biometric surveillance at Wegmans
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It's not only at groceries stores, it's everywhere. For example at TSA security line and (sometimes) when boarding flights at the gate. You can (and should) exercise your right to opt-out every single time, before that right is taken away. Omg I sound like Richard Stallman... anyway, he was right all along.
> Ask Wegmans directly to exclude you from facial recognition - Send an email to their privacy team
The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.
Kinda funny.
Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.
I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"
They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.
I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!
The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.
Good write up. Still I gotta say: a N95 mask will do the trick for cheap, with side bonus of also blocking flu & covid!
I don't see how you can enforce no face scanning if you allow security cameras.
Business Reform on YouTube has some tests and reviews of this kind of gear.
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The irony of being fingerprinted to read a blog about fingerprinting is apparently lost on Adafruit.
I think we're far past the point where you can avoid being tracked anywhere in the world, and that's even if you wear sunglasses, a hat, and you use no technology (no phone, etc).
Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".
If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.
I saw Adafruit and was anticipating a clever gadget announcement. Suppose some problems still need to solved the old fashioned way.
How do I get Kroger to not scan my face? All these grocer companies are doing this same market analysis seemingly without giving good faith notice. I guess they are not legally required to inform their targets. It seems there needs to be some improvement in consumer protection laws. Dunnhumby and 84.51° are thick into this "taking".
so even if you don't have your face scanned on the register, unless you're paying cash they'd still know who you are right? don't most people have passports? real ID is also a thing. if you're concerned about a hostile government wearing a mask at a grocery store isn't going to do anything sadly. not even counting things like gait analysis, security cameras or tracking your phone
Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).
personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.
- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do
https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-accuses-amazon-secretl...
This is one of the side effects of the shoplifting trends in recent years.
I don't think there is any alternative to this. I assume every corporation is filming me in their stores, building shopper profiles, that granularly identify me in every conceivable way. I am not surprised at all that Wegmans is taking a picture of my face. It's good to know, it's good for this to be in the news, but I can't imagine any grocery store, not taking advantage of video surveillance, profiling, all of that stuff if it will help them sell more.
Why does anyone need to opt out at all?
You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?
I fear people will just get used to it just like other means of mass surveillance then wonder why they're being harassed with petty pretexts based on this data.
FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
We need a startup to make those super realistic face masks easy to make and use. Celebrities could license their faces to make up for movies and tv being AI generated.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned that almost 25% of the entire US workforce is remote and this has dramatically moved shopping over to online delivery.
In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.
> Switch to stores with stronger privacy policies: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Food Bazaar have not announced biometric scanning.
Just because they haven't announced it doesn't mean they're not using it.
Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.
All those security cameras are there for a reason.