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0 pointsendisneigh2y ago0 comments

Target and CVS are not "advertising companies". And if you'd like you can pay cash, no? The indirection (ad company to retailer) is intentional.

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nirvdrum2y ago

Given companies are doing subject tracking with in-store cameras and can use facial recognition to tell who you are, cash isn't going to be sufficient. They'll be able to build a pretty compelling shopping profile and can tie associate your cash purchases to your profile. Sure, it's not 100% fool-proof, but it doesn't need to be to be a massive privacy invasion. I suppose you could wear a mask, but that's generally frowned upon in stores.

OmarShehata2y ago

The industry is still struggling to track who's clicking on ads properly in all cases...we're very far from this idea of tracking cash purchases & building a profile with facial recognition. This sounds like science fiction. Are there any companies actually doing anything like this?

Closest thing I know is companies who sell "foot traffic" data, of who walks in front of your store. But that's done with phones pinging wifi networks passively as you walk, not anything as fancy as facial recognition.

Example: https://grapeseedmedia.com/blog/foot-traffic-data/

nirvdrum2y ago

I think the problems with click fraud are orthogonal. They're a different domain with different characteristics and different solutions.

Facial recognition has been deployed to combat shoplifting [1][2]. Amazon Go is a store built around not needing to check out at a register at all. Microsoft offers Azure Kinect [3] as a way for retailers to track people moving through a store. There's no shortage of companies purporting to use AI to analyze in-store video in real-time to analyze customer behavior [4][5]. There was a video shared on this site a few weeks back showing a coffee shop tracking both customers and baristas [6] (more discussion there, including some skepticism).

I'm speculating that if they can track you in the store and build a profile on you that they'll be able to track your cash purchases. I don't think it's a terribly large leap to tie into their point of sale terminals but I don't know if any retailer is currently doing that or even planning to do that.

[1] -- https://youtu.be/g5Xf9Y6-RS4?si=De7EZTyVD66BQPeG

[2] -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/technology/facial- recognition-shoplifters-britain.html

[3] -- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/kinect-dk/

[4] -- https://viso.ai/features/

[5] -- https://twitter.com/jowyang/status/1214657642313871360

[6] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37186806

yomlica82y ago

K-Mart apparently tracks with facial recognition.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-13/bunnings-kmart-invest...

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