Was researching age verification and came across this absolute nightmare:
Tracks everything you do around the entire store for “loss prevention,” tries to verify your age through facial scans. It also records your history and keeps it on record forever until it re-identifies you again.
There’s a lot of buzz around online age verification but it seems we need to be worried about age verification systems in physical stores as well. This is why I believe we need privacy-preserving age verification systems based on cryptography, so we can avoid things like this.
Physical stores are worse for tracking than online stores these days it seems. Not sure what stores employ this but it would be good to have a list of shame for every store that has terrible systems like this in place.
These solutions will specifically integrate with other aspects such as tracking you around the store, across other stores, and linking your purchases via the POS terminals.
No need for a full blown ski mask. Medical face mask and maybe shades should be enough but honestly I do not know if it is actually more weird or less weird.
I second this. The ski mask remark sounds like a joke, but let me say this. If someone walks into a shopping mall with a ski mask on, the mall’s security or police (maybe other shoppers too) will probably stop them at first sight. Everyone’s experience of COVID gives people some level of cover to wear a medical mask without the level of stigma that existed before COVID. That said, some shops and services (banks just to name one) ask mask wearers to deanonymize themselves, and depending on where people live (anti-mask areas vs pro-mask areas) some people treat mask wearers as suspicious. I have been refused entry into some shops (and experienced other mild mistreatment) because I wore a mask, shades and hat.
If these surveillance systems link purchases to identities, it would appear paying with cash won’t save people from these systems. The cash payment would no longer be anonymous from these systems. Cash payment would still be anonymous/private from banks and credit card companies.
On the ftxidentity page, the pic showing the smiling lady having her face scanned by the camera is fkn creepy.
I can’t believe this kind of intrusive abuse is tolerated and positively marketed in today’s modern society. Without doubt we’re living in a techno dystopia.
I wonder if shops that operate these systems display a privacy notice before they are subject to that abuse, or if this form of abuse is restricted by GDPR.
I read somewhere that putting a small rock in your shoe is an effective countermeasure against gait analysis. No idea if that’s true with current tech or not though.
If this were to be done with traditional surveillance cameras, hats and masks would be useful.
Meanwhile, there are already attempts to estimate age and gender from factors such as fashion, bone structure, and facial features, and then digitize them (a major Japanese convenience store has posted a sign announcing that it will be collecting such estimated data), and this trend is expected to continue.
Protesters wary of the surveillance cameras wore hats, sunglasses, and masks to avoid facial recognition. However, China’s facial recognition technology can now get around masks and sunglasses. People who disguised themselves still received intimidating calls or visits from police, which transparently told them exactly how they tracked them down.
It is possible to identify a person wearing a face mask.
the smiling lady having her face scanned by the camera is fkn creepy
That’s pretty much the PR behind surveillance. You see this everywhere including UK pushing for age verification.
I can’t believe this kind of intrusive abuse is tolerated and positively marketed in today’s modern society.
They are endorsed by politicians and those in power. We can see this around the world lately. I always like to remind myself about Orwell’s 1984. And it’s so ironic that UK is recently the biggest bad guy
About CCP tracking down protestors, is it solely facial recognition technology getting around masks and sunglasses, or were human cops involved too? There would have been human cops looking through the footage manually to identify protestors. Some of the protestors carried phones too. I also wonder how many protestors they could correctly identify and how many they could not.
At the beginning of COVID, high-end facial recognition technologies could identify masked faces under certain controlled conditions. For instance, ticket gates at train stations that are equipped with controlled lighting and optimally-positioned cameras could identify masked faces. I don’t know if it was just facial recognition or some other technology used in combination.
I don’t mean to imply people who wear a face mask are unidentifiable. A face masks covers only the face, and not all of the face. It does not cover the eyes, ears, forehead or hair. Thinking broader, someone who wants to prevent identification would also need to consider gait, other biometrics, the clothing they wear and the objects (including phones!) they carry.
However, someone wearing a face mask is less identifiable than someone not wearing a face mask. The key exception is when there is only one person who ever wears a face mask, then that person essentially becomes 100% identifiable as “the person who wears a face mask.”
Back to the topic of this thread, shopping malls and retail stores don’t always have optimal lighting and cameras at the best angle. They don’t always use facial recognition or keep video footage for prolonged time for that matter. Thus, it generally helps to take counter-surveillance measures like wearing a face mask, but results may vary. If one of those identification/analysis surveillance systems are in a shop, it would be best to hide your face from those cameras if you want to avoid that surveillance, or refuse to do business with them.
To add my few cents, regarding phones - I think it’s a bigger liability than your face. If shops were to spy on every customer, they would place RFC readers in place. We have wi-fi pretty much at every bigger store nowadays. Sometimes bluetooth. It would be much easier without national-agency-level face readers.
WiFi and Bluetooth can have randomized MAC addresses, but you can’t randomize your face or gait. That’s why biometric surveillance is so insidious to me. There’s always a way we could make online shopping more private but in-person physical stores you have to go to with your human body and all its identifiable glory.
