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.
If they are, and aren't posting signs, that would be a story in itself. Of course it could still be happening, it sounds like the law is fairly toothless, but it did get Wegmans to post the sign, so probably not useless.
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-wegmans-is-storing-biometric-...
Each year, there are over a million arrests for shoplifting in the United States (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2019),
See also Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft (2024) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth...
Local member owned food co-ops would be a good alternative if there's one near you.
They don't have to be fancy and expensive. My local co-op strives to offer affordable options on most staples and bulk foods, and frequently undercuts the chains (including Wegmans) on produce, especially local produce when they can source it.
Do they have 20 types of chips and 300 cereals? No, but I can shop in a 20-30 minutes instead of the hour minimum Wegmans demands.
> "We trust our customers and do not conduct surveillance on them. When necessary, we take appropriate action, including having security cameras and security guards in our stores, to help ensure the safety of our customers and Crew Members," the company said.
https://abc7.com/post/trader-joes-targeted-in-7-socal-armed-...
This is their purpose, they're used to build cases over time, instead of single instances of petty theft, until shoplifters can be charged with felonies when the cumulative amount that they stole reaches felony levels.
I know of at least one chain that uses them to flag certain people to loss prevention or security when they enter the store, either because of shoplifting or because they were trespassed in the past.
The data shouldn't exist in the first place, and neither should surveilled society.
I've heard the idea of combining multiple misdemeanor thefts to make a felony. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't that require an ongoing criminal conspiracy/enterprise to "combine" such disparate acts into a single, chargeable crime?
Some state laws do "upgrade" crimes, both misdemeanor --> felony and felony --> more serious felony based on prior convictions, but not (AFAIK) with multiple separate acts whose aggregate value is greater than the cutoff between petty theft and grand theft.
What's more, it's the local prosecutor who decides what charges to bring against someone accused of shoplifting, not the "Loss Prevention" team at a store or its corporate parent.
The idea just seems unlike how local/state laws and justice systems work in the US.
I could be (and likely am) wrong about this, but I've been unable to find state laws[0] which specify that multiple, separate acts of shoplifting can be combined into a single grand theft felony.
Would you share which states have such laws? It would be much appreciated!
[0] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa... [1]
[1] See the bottom of the page for links to most US state laws.
Also, consider someone stealing small amounts over a year from a single store, a chain of stores or a group of stores with the same owners. The victims in these cases are the same entity.
That said, the trend in my area is for business owners to share data about accused shoplifters, help law enforcement with investigations, etc. I would not be surprised if they're all using a platform to do this these days.
See also:
- https://legalclarity.org/do-stores-build-cases-on-shoplifter...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/11/organized-retail-crime-nine-...
- https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/12/30/new-in-2025-cracking-down-...
- https://www.davisfirmllc.com/blog/the-retail-theft-aggregati...
- https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/monica...
Also, you don't want to criminalize the person who stole one small thing vs serial shoplifter.
Happened at the expansion at the one I worked at and the shoplifters went ham for a while after they figured that out
Walmart was sued [0] for exactly what Wegmans just started in 2022,
Walmart is sued [1] by delivery drivers,
and, so on.
[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/privacy/bipa...
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/walm...
[2] https://caseguard.com/articles/retail-corporation-walmart-fa...
The store I worked at was also a shitshow that barely operated so maybe I was just in their local minimum.
Kroger had this too, which made every shopping trip take dramatically longer because the employees would already take 5-10 minutes to come over when they didn't have to reset every self-checkout every other item.
I refuse to shop anywhere that has them. We already have to deal with the constant "Please place item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in the bagging area.", why do we need extra aggravation when it's only going to slightly slow down a very specific class of shoplifter?
Every large chain does.
> All those security cameras are there for a reason.
To show you that they can afford them. As if cameras are a reasonable way to stop shoplifting in the first place.
How are they not?
They're pretty essentially both for catching a lot of shoplifting in the first place, as well as providing evidence in court.
When crime is unpunished and the police won’t do anything and the politicians don’t care, then businesses either have to adapt with new models or close
XMR is not illegal to use or own, shoplifting is.
The bad thing about mafia enforcement is you don’t get civil rights. Oh, and if the mob boss wants a favor then you’re going to have to oblige, even if it puts you at risk.
If police and DAs don’t take their jobs seriously, this is what they are inviting back into society.
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
December 2023: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret...
OP your post was "if you dont like face scanning don't shop there" because shops need face scanning to stop crime.
However your next comment was that cops don't help. Here's the thing. They have a pretty terrible track record of help in any city including red ones. Have you called after having a fender bender on the highway in any state? Near a city, the answer is "no public property or third party damaged? exchange info yourself". Despite this they have been well-funded in the last few election cycles and this does not depend on the party elected.
How about when an iphone gets stolen, or all the people using airtags to track their luggage? The private sector also does a so/so to shit job of helping you. Apple will let you find your phone, but its up to you to go get it, or wipe and restart.
Tracking and storing all of my info and my face does not make the cops more effective at their jobs or prioritize this shop owner you know. Tracking and storing my info and face, doesn't help the shop keeper.
It does however, seem that all this tracking of my info results in my information getting leaked time and time and again. Meaning that I've gone for a shop and somehow the probability of something being stolen from me goes up
But I wish that the stress of living in a panopticon would be argument enough.
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
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
If you really want people to fight, it’s better to use fighting words, to cheer on allies who are fighting, or to give examples of how you have successfully fought back. This also counters attempts at demoralization.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
Or use one of the pool phone numbers. NPA-867-5309 is a common one.
- this has worked for me in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
For example it’s illegal to hire foreign undocumented labor but in literally zero of the companies who have been raided recently the only people punished were the working people who are just trying to live
Pitting people against each other should be a last, last, last, resort.
Low trust is VERY expensive. It's asinine to introduce it to anywhere it doesn't already exist.
There needs to be protections and incentives for, for example, low level employees to report their employers when they're privy to them breaking the law.
I'd argue recording people to the point of virtual stalking, selling data, building dossiers, etc is a violation of basic trust and the foundation of a low trust society.
A store could easily have security cameras operating without issue. They don't need to do any more smarts on it.
It's where you draw the line on smarts that's the thing.
- Person-shaped-object crossed from public-area to private area (eg through a staff-only door) without a corresponding door swipe event.
- Person-shaped-object appears to take an object off a shelf and put it in their bag/pocket.
- Specifically tracking a person over multiple cameras in one visit as they navigate the store, without associating with an identity
- Using facial recognition to recognise the same person over multiple visits/stores, and being able to track their activity over all of those visits.
There could be arguments for some of these being permitted without it being a total invasion of privacy.
Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.
It may not be an issue for you at the moment, but outright dismissal will not keep you safe.
What scares me about TSA using it is that it normalizes its use. Next it's at stadiums. Then Wegmans. If it would stop at airports, then I would be okay with it.
Not at all? A human isn't committing you to long term memory let alone entering a detailed sketch into a centralized database.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequently-asked-questions/does-t...
I get the temptation to do this, I really do, but I really don't recommend this. The TSA is in a position to make your day much worse. It's better just to opt-out and say nothing. Opting out is well within your rights (it's posted on the sign at the start of the line).
Follow instructions. Keep your mouth shut. Eyes forward. On your way.
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?
If you disagree, you can choose to shop somewhere else. It's literally that simple.
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...
Or, amazing life hack, don’t do crimes, on video or otherwise.
Not saying there are no privacy concerns, but I WANT this used in court against criminals
Keep in mind I said criminal law. Yes, I drive over 55MPH. But even these non-criminal law things would be fixed in a week if the 99% of Americans who "speed" were ticketed for it by speed cameras every day, because the politicians who are empowered to make those laws rational would feel immense pressure.
I realize that my feelings for this should and would change if we passed much worse laws. But that's an argument for participating in the process and reforming government. "Let's let most crimes go unpunished" (not saying you're saying this) is a poor solution for the problem of "We're letting corrupt and evil people shape the law."
In response to your last question, it's a good litmus test for whether you believe democracy is okay. Yes, if the majority of my neighbors actually voted on and supported a law I disagree with, and it doesn't violate the Constitution, then I ought to abide by it, or move to a different state. My feelings don't override those of the majority. The Constitution is supposed to be the backstop against horrible laws like "All $RACE must report to prison immediately or be shot." There is, I think, another school of thought that disagrees with me, and thinks that if the voters enact a policy they don't like, then it's the voters who are wrong, and we should neither abide by it, nor try to convince those voters to repeal it, but instead just protest and assert one's opinion as fact. That seems anti-democracy to me. It's more of "me-ocracy."
Anyways, the solution, as always, is noise. They leave their data pipelines open and assume all the data is mostly clean. There needs to be a massive technological development for the population to just clog those channels with so much noise they become effectively useless.
DDoS of the surveillance state.
Like ALPR cameras and now Flock cameras, no one cares and if you seem to care, people assume you're up to no good.
This is the same culture that obsessively watches their Ring cameras and posts videos of people innocently walking down the street on the Nextdoor app because seeing the wrong people existing outside scares them.
I suspect it may have more to do with how local law enforcement handles shoplifting and theft generally than actual customer demographics.
They literally have nothing better to do so this, traffic enforcement and bothering kids who are trying to have a good time are the bulk of their duty, so I'd agree.
> It's so weird to me that the stores in "nicer" areas seem to be on the forefront of this crap.
I think a certain kind of person is comforted by surveillance. They perceive it, usually somewhat correctly from places of immense privilege, to be for their benefit and protection. They idea that it would be used against them, who are Good, and not against those people, who are Bad, is laughable to them if the concept even crosses their minds.
Maybe you're one of those people if the cameras bother you, is the sentiment.
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.
How does surveillance prevalent with online delivery services substantially differ from biometric ones?
> 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.
This just doesn't make sense.
Are you asserting that people going into grocery stores now are more likely to commit theft due to those using online delivery services no longer engaging in on-premise shopping?
Or is it your premise that people who typically use online delivery services only go into grocery stores to steal?
The people who avoid online and delivery may not have a choice and are more price sensitive or likely to shoplift, so those other stores also have to increase security.
I'm saying that people have become segregated. The suburbanite middle and upper classes don't "stop by on the way home from work" anymore and they aren't leaving home just to shop unless it's worth the hassle. They expect much higher levels of convenience and safety than ever before. Increased security everywhere makes sense.
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.
The irony of being fingerprinted to read a blog about fingerprinting is apparently lost on Adafruit.
if you’ve got ideas or want to help us test better solutions, we’re totally open — reach out.
and what's that? oh right! we’re one of the few sites that still respects do not track — and always have.
full text is available via rss (no js, no cookies): https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
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.
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.