Facial recognition software in stores is wrongly pegging innocent customers as thieves. TheBBC has the story.
Sara needed some chocolate – she had had one of those days – so wandered into a Home Bargains store.
“Within less than a minute, I’m approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, ‘You’re a thief, you need to leave the store’.”
Sara – who wants to remain anonymous – was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch.
She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology.
“I was just crying and crying the entire journey home… I thought, ‘Oh, will my life be the same? I’m going to be looked at as a shoplifter when I’ve never stolen’.”
Facewatch later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error.
Facewatch is used in numerous stores in the U.K. – including Budgens, Sports Direct and Costcutter – to identify shoplifters. …
It’s not just retailers who are turning to the technology.
On a humid day in Bethnal Green, in East London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street.
Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people’s faces.
If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them. …
The BBC spoke to several people approached by the police who confirmed that they had been correctly identified by the system – 192 arrests have been made so far this year as a result of it.
But civil liberty groups are worried that its accuracy is yet to be fully established, and point to cases such as Shaun Thompson’s.
Mr. Thompson, who works for youth-advocacy group Streetfathers, didn’t think much of it when he walked by a white van near London Bridge in February.
Within a few seconds, though, he was approached by police and told he was a wanted man.
“That’s when I got a nudge on the shoulder, saying at that time I’m wanted.”
He was asked to give fingerprints and held for 20 minutes. He says he was let go only after handing over a copy of his passport.
But it was a case of mistaken identity.
“It felt intrusive… I was treated guilty until proven innocent,” he says.
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Has anyone sued the organisation that has falsely identified someone as a third party? You’d have thought that there could be a market for solicitors in that market!
I’m sure the purpose is to identify people who have previously stolen from the same or another shop – and to identify them and stop them before they steal anything this time. When the tech is sufficiently poor as to incorrectly identify someone as a known shoplifter the whole thing unravels.
About 30 or so years ago I knew the head of premises security of a major high street chain. He gave me a guided tour of the head office CCTV room. Many screens with many people watching and passing comments to each other along the lines of ‘Is that so-and-so in the xyz branch? Better watch him carefully.’. Many people watching many screens costs much money. It’s far cheaper if a computer can do it… If being the key word.
Those stealing to fund a drug habit and they were usually easy to spot and either deter or catch.
The others were those who were professionals stealing to order or to sell on. Harder to spot but easy to deter (they had no interest in being caught and were happy to try again elsewhere tomorrow) and harder to catch.
As soundofreason says control rooms cost money to monitor and again rely on humans to spot what’s going on.
From the stores point of view stop them getting in in the first place as they’re very reluctant to challenge these days due to the risk of assault on the staff.
However a member of staff calling a customer (because that’s what they are at this point) a thief is slanderous and would (in my day) immediately be triggering phone calls to head office and apologies to try and stop the matter going forward.
As I said above I’d be amazed if the company is taking liability so the onus is still on the employees to be sure
I knew a store detective decades ago who was keen on his work
My recent experience of “security” staff is that they have little interest or motivation to catch wrong’uns – possibly the management are quite happy with that and it’s mainly for show
I’ve known both. Some are very good but sadly many give it the effort you can expect for a job that’s little if anything above minimum wage…
Also those who were in it for the “rough and tumble” while catching them and we’re enthusiastic to do so, (I won’t say if that’s the right approach) have moved on as they’re now little more than a “high visibility deterrent”
There is a third type: those with plenty of money, either from respectable middle class, or even extremely wealthy upper class, families, who shoplift for the evil “thrill” of getting away with it.
I was told this by an English shopkeeper in a very wealthy part of London decades ago. He said the worst shoplifters were extremely wealthy little old ladies whom you would never suspect. They would steal small, inexpensive items just for the thrill of it, because it was a kind of “Lords & Serfs” statement of their “right” to the goods of the peasants. And because they knew the shopkeepers could not afford huge court cases against them for such small items, and would be forced to tolerate it. It was like a “power trip” for them.
Another example was two young women in their 20s, former classmates from a respectable Catholic school and respectable Catholic families in a small town, who were caught in a large department store after slipping one greetings card each into their pockets. No one in the town could understand it, because they had plenty of money to pay for the items. It didn’t make any sense at the time.
But both cases show the real reason: A TOTAL LACK OF MORALITY.
The other problem is that, just like Humza’s Hate Crime Act, anyone with a grudge against you can secretly and falsely accuse you to the shop managers, who then set up the facial recognition technology to target you, which is what probably happened to the innocent shopper in this article.
People are very fond of breaking the Ninth Commandment:
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”
One they’ll probably come up with some injectable safe and effective medication that claims to be able to distinguish pathogenic viruses from human DNA. I wonder what percentage of “bad stops” there will be. Oh, wait…
“Big Brother is Watching You” has never seemed so apt.
This is just the start. Plod will love it because it means they can virtually work from home and not get involved in real policing and our proxy government will trot out the usual “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.”Meanwhile some tweaks to all the traffic management camera software will ensure that there is blanket coverage 24 / 7.
As I have said previously, thirty seven billion on track and trace wasn’t spaffed and here is where some of it was spent.
The retailers are using the nothing to hide, nothing to fear trope.
“Facewatch has not put any customer off shopping with us [Ruxley Manor]. In my opinion you should only worry if you have something to be worried about because Facewatch will detect you.”
I wish people knew their rights. That store had no right to search the wrongly identified woman’s bag. I would sue them. A few embarrassing court cases might make them more careful.
Have you ever had the alarm go off in a supermarket as you exit, with your paid for items safely packed up in your shopping bags? A security guard has no right to search these bags as they are your property. Yes, you are innocent, but why should you allow your rights to be violated because, essentially, the computer says no? If they have proof you have stolen something, let them call the police. You could also say that you would give your name and address to a police officer if asked, simply because you have nothing to hide. I have a right to privacy, and no one is searching my shopping or getting my name and address unless they have a legal right to. There is far too much kowtowing to the authority some petty minded people love to assume.
Not really. They have to prove that you stole something(eg, being catching you in the act personally or on CCTV) and not the other way round. I never keep receipts because I think they’re just annoying rubbish and I would advise everyone against trying to take something from me which is my property because I bought it.
NB: This might not work out in practice, see comment below, as the police is more likely to believe in something ‘security’ made up than to believe the person something was made up about, but that’s – IMHO – nevertheless the correct position to take.
I was exiting a large supermarket at the same time as a few other people when the alarm went off and the store security bod came over. We all stopped and he asked if we had bought any tagged goods. A woman with her child in tow started complaining that he had only picked on her because she was black. The security bod pointed out that he was black too and so was one of the other guys waiting to see why the alarm had gone off. He checked my and the other chap’s shopping and we left with the woman complaining loudly about ‘What sort of message does this give my child if he sees me stopped and singled out?’. I didn’t wait to see what else happened.
I didn’t say she should have allowed them to search her. I said she may have allowed them, and therefore she couldn’t sue them, as you had suggested. She was innocent, so she may well have agreed to being searched, as she had nothing to hide. That’s not saying she should have allowed them to search her.
I remember the day after 77 in 2005 at Hereford train station. I would often stop there and get a hot chocolate in the Cafe there. After coming back from the toilet, two uniformed guys approached me asking what I’m doing then told me I can’t come to the station if not getting on a train, can’t quite remember what my reply I was somewhat taken off guard. Of course, they had no right to stop me going about my business in a public place, but I was young and green I guess.
In theory, that’s right. In practice, “private” security guards are – according to first-hand information from a police officer – authorized to use whatever they believe to be reasonable force to get whatever they believe to be their job done. They could have pinned the woman to the ground and strip-searched her, followed by getting her arrested based on nothing but making wild claims to the police.
This may eventually result in “an embarrassing court case” but that’s not going to solve the immediate problem of someone who (innocently) fell into the clutches of these people.
Perhaps so. I may be stricken in years but I am still heavily muscled and trained in the arts of physical bodily harm. I would be pleased to be accused of something of which I am not guilty by some overweight champion of imaginary legal rights.
Shoplifters are people who are trying to steal goods from shops and not people about which some bit of intransparent piece of software whose workings is based on recording each and every shoppers face and then send the data for processing to an overseas (in all likeliness) data center for processing claims that they had stolen something from some shop in the past. This is absolutely outrageous as it amounts creating a universal automated ‘private’ surveillance system to punish people for crimes they didn’t commit.
The purpose of Facewatch is to harm people for not doing anything wrong. If that’s not already a criminal offence, it should certainly be made one and the people who invented this ‘service’ ought to be punished severely enough that future morons coming up with similar “business ideas” will be detained from actually putting them into practice.
It’s getting the same on Facebook and probably other social media platforms. It seems there are various bots masquerading as users, or possibly human users deploying AI, that trawl the membership to see if their comments and profile look like the canonical sceptic created during the AI training. If they match, the bot taps them on the shoulder and they are led away to a FB police station and won’t be released unless they can identify motorcycles and explain why they upticked a remark by Donald Trump during his presidential election campaign.
The next step will be to couple the facial recognition to an automatic assassination robot disguised as a friendly yellow dog, thereby triggering the Base Rate Fallacy problem.
Assuming my twin brother (I don’t have) murdered his spouse and escaped from policy custody after his trial, am I to be arrested in lieu of him because of “facial recognition software”? Further assuming I am, for how often? Everytime I walk past another police “white van”?
Some of Hitchhock’s movies are based on mistaken identity. Google tells me that The Wrong Man is one such example, but that has a happy-ish ending. In the one I have in mind but of which I have forgotten the title there is a downbeat ending in which the person fails to convince anybody, including his wife, dog and employer, that he is who he is, and becomes completely cancelled into a void.
That reminds me of a film I saw in the 1980s as a child, where a women is pretending to be someone’s wife, and the guy knows she is not his wife but cannot prove it. If that film sounds familiar, let me know.
A rich friend bought himself a new soft-top BMW. We took the mickey about it being a bit late for a mid-life crisis.
He then got a speeding ticket through the post. He was just about to shrug and pay up and send off his licence when he realised it could not be him because he was out of the country at the time. He was then able to show that although the speeding car was similar to his, it was another car with cloned plates. After that his registration was on a watch list and he kept getting stopped all over the place. He was told by one officer that the other car had been involved in an incident where a passenger was standing up in the back seat ‘exposing himself’ as the car drove along. We fell about laughing.
Mogwai
1 year ago
What a total balls up, and I also think she should see a lawyer and hopefully take this shop to the cleaners. But who’s going to be pathetic enough to steal from Home Bargains though? It’s kind of on a par with nicking a midget gem from Woolies’ Pick ‘n Mix back in the day, stuffing it in your gob and hoping nobody noticed. Not that I’m speaking from experience. ( I was all about those white chocolate mice back then anyway ). Or even Pound Land. Imagine getting a criminal record for thieving something that cost one or two quid? The shame…
Anyways, was this lady of the non-white demographic? In which case she can just plead ‘racism’ or ‘reparations’ and she should be good as gold. In fact, she most likely wouldn’t have even been stopped in the first place. After all, everybody knows that if you’re the right colour you can carry a machete down your pants down the street or walk around a music venue with a camping-sized backpack, looking shifty and sweaty-lipped, and you’ll be left well alone. We’ve enough evidence to show this to be the case by now. Just don’t look remotely ‘far right’ and you’ll be golden.
The AI people are desperate for actually monetizing their carp. AFAICT, the only somwhat successful product they’ve come up with so far is to use AI chat programs and image generation for sexting-as-a-service. Quite a bit less ambitious than most of their plans so far have been. Hence, they’re mostly selling ‘magic’ to gullible fools.
Like the example here: It’s sold as shoplifting protection, as if some pattern recognition software considering two faces identical to each other would mean someone was about to commit a crime. In reality, it’s harassment-as-a-service for customers and executed by foolish and aggressive shop staff convinced that their employers have so many customers that it really doesn’t matter if they lose 1 or 2 or 200 or 2000 or whichever other number can be reached before this system is decomissioned on the grounds that it’s demonstrably harming the business and has no other demonstrable effects.
pamela preedy
1 year ago
Live Facial Recognition or LFR. On the photo of the police notice at the top of the article, it says ‘there is no legal requirement to pass through the LFR system’.
But is it positioned in shops where the unwary customer has no choice but to pass through it when entering? Is there a warning notice before the customer passes through it?
If I saw such a warning notice when approaching, that shop would lose my custom. I object to being treated as a potential or proven thief as much as I objected to being treated as a potential terrorist by airport security.
In 2008 I was told to remove my cardigan, belt and shoes by a sniffy security officer. As a white woman in my sixties wearing light summer clothes covered by a cardigan to hide my elderly arms, I felt unfairly picked on and humiliated by being made to undress in public.
I swore then never to fly again and I never have.
If shops are going down this route of getting in our faces and making mistakes, I will do all my shopping online.(Yes, I know that Google et al spy on us all the time, but I am resistant to advertising.)
So tired of being ordered about and spied on in this increasingly authoritarian and intrusive society.
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Has anyone sued the organisation that has falsely identified someone as a third party? You’d have thought that there could be a market for solicitors in that market!
Coming from a retail background that’s (what in my day) would be classed as a “bad stop”.
Absolutely everything was done to avoid them as it was viewed as an open and shut case of defamation and unlawful detention.
I’d be surprised if that’s changed and even more surprised if the shop concerned can pass the blame to the technology provider
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this- I would have thought it was relatively easy to spot shoplifters
I’m sure the purpose is to identify people who have previously stolen from the same or another shop – and to identify them and stop them before they steal anything this time. When the tech is sufficiently poor as to incorrectly identify someone as a known shoplifter the whole thing unravels.
About 30 or so years ago I knew the head of premises security of a major high street chain. He gave me a guided tour of the head office CCTV room. Many screens with many people watching and passing comments to each other along the lines of ‘Is that so-and-so in the xyz branch? Better watch him carefully.’. Many people watching many screens costs much money. It’s far cheaper if a computer can do it… If being the key word.
It depends, there were 2 main types.
Those stealing to fund a drug habit and they were usually easy to spot and either deter or catch.
The others were those who were professionals stealing to order or to sell on. Harder to spot but easy to deter (they had no interest in being caught and were happy to try again elsewhere tomorrow) and harder to catch.
As soundofreason says control rooms cost money to monitor and again rely on humans to spot what’s going on.
From the stores point of view stop them getting in in the first place as they’re very reluctant to challenge these days due to the risk of assault on the staff.
However a member of staff calling a customer (because that’s what they are at this point) a thief is slanderous and would (in my day) immediately be triggering phone calls to head office and apologies to try and stop the matter going forward.
As I said above I’d be amazed if the company is taking liability so the onus is still on the employees to be sure
Thanks for the information
Makes sense
I do wonder if the people employed in these control rooms have any talent or enthusiasm for the work
They certainly have when the boss is showing someone around.
I knew a store detective decades ago who was keen on his work
My recent experience of “security” staff is that they have little interest or motivation to catch wrong’uns – possibly the management are quite happy with that and it’s mainly for show
I’ve known both. Some are very good but sadly many give it the effort you can expect for a job that’s little if anything above minimum wage…
Also those who were in it for the “rough and tumble” while catching them and we’re enthusiastic to do so, (I won’t say if that’s the right approach) have moved on as they’re now little more than a “high visibility deterrent”
Yup that makes sense
There is a third type: those with plenty of money, either from respectable middle class, or even extremely wealthy upper class, families, who shoplift for the evil “thrill” of getting away with it.
I was told this by an English shopkeeper in a very wealthy part of London decades ago. He said the worst shoplifters were extremely wealthy little old ladies whom you would never suspect. They would steal small, inexpensive items just for the thrill of it, because it was a kind of “Lords & Serfs” statement of their “right” to the goods of the peasants. And because they knew the shopkeepers could not afford huge court cases against them for such small items, and would be forced to tolerate it. It was like a “power trip” for them.
Another example was two young women in their 20s, former classmates from a respectable Catholic school and respectable Catholic families in a small town, who were caught in a large department store after slipping one greetings card each into their pockets. No one in the town could understand it, because they had plenty of money to pay for the items. It didn’t make any sense at the time.
But both cases show the real reason: A TOTAL LACK OF MORALITY.
The other problem is that, just like Humza’s Hate Crime Act, anyone with a grudge against you can secretly and falsely accuse you to the shop managers, who then set up the facial recognition technology to target you, which is what probably happened to the innocent shopper in this article.
People are very fond of breaking the Ninth Commandment:
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”
Lets add in AI, Government digital currencies, Smart Metering, everything in the cloud….What could possibly go wrong.
One they’ll probably come up with some injectable safe and effective medication that claims to be able to distinguish pathogenic viruses from human DNA. I wonder what percentage of “bad stops” there will be. Oh, wait…
“Big Brother is Watching You” has never seemed so apt.
This is just the start. Plod will love it because it means they can virtually work from home and not get involved in real policing and our proxy government will trot out the usual “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.”Meanwhile some tweaks to all the traffic management camera software will ensure that there is blanket coverage 24 / 7.
As I have said previously, thirty seven billion on track and trace wasn’t spaffed and here is where some of it was spent.
The retailers are using the nothing to hide, nothing to fear trope.
“Facewatch has not put any customer off shopping with us [Ruxley Manor]. In my opinion you should only worry if you have something to be worried about because Facewatch will detect you.”
https://www.facewatch.co.uk/
And the latest story along those lines was on GBN about an alleged 17 year old murderer being released without charge, following a stabbing on the beach in Bournemouth a couple of days ago. They showed some clips of CCTV, which may or may not have been used to identify the suspect. Supposedly still under investigation. Also on ITV news: https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2024-05-27/bournemouth-beach-stabbing-victim-named-as-17-year-old-released-without-charge
(same CCTV clips as broadcast by GBN).
I wish people knew their rights. That store had no right to search the wrongly identified woman’s bag. I would sue them. A few embarrassing court cases might make them more careful.
She may have voluntarily agreed to have her bag searched. She was innocent, why wouldn’t she?
Have you ever had the alarm go off in a supermarket as you exit, with your paid for items safely packed up in your shopping bags? A security guard has no right to search these bags as they are your property. Yes, you are innocent, but why should you allow your rights to be violated because, essentially, the computer says no? If they have proof you have stolen something, let them call the police. You could also say that you would give your name and address to a police officer if asked, simply because you have nothing to hide. I have a right to privacy, and no one is searching my shopping or getting my name and address unless they have a legal right to. There is far too much kowtowing to the authority some petty minded people love to assume.
Good reason to keep receipts, I’m guilty of not always getting one and the staff these days don’t seem bothered either.
Not really. They have to prove that you stole something(eg, being catching you in the act personally or on CCTV) and not the other way round. I never keep receipts because I think they’re just annoying rubbish and I would advise everyone against trying to take something from me which is my property because I bought it.
NB: This might not work out in practice, see comment below, as the police is more likely to believe in something ‘security’ made up than to believe the person something was made up about, but that’s – IMHO – nevertheless the correct position to take.
I always insist on taking a receipt:
1. Self-protection – most of my purchases are in cash.
2. I do not want companies to think that no receipts is normal.
3. It suits my cantankerous nature.
4. Although I detest waste when it comes to receipts – F. ’em.
My position too, hux
Thanks M A k.
I was exiting a large supermarket at the same time as a few other people when the alarm went off and the store security bod came over. We all stopped and he asked if we had bought any tagged goods. A woman with her child in tow started complaining that he had only picked on her because she was black. The security bod pointed out that he was black too and so was one of the other guys waiting to see why the alarm had gone off. He checked my and the other chap’s shopping and we left with the woman complaining loudly about ‘What sort of message does this give my child if he sees me stopped and singled out?’. I didn’t wait to see what else happened.
I didn’t say she should have allowed them to search her. I said she may have allowed them, and therefore she couldn’t sue them, as you had suggested. She was innocent, so she may well have agreed to being searched, as she had nothing to hide. That’s not saying she should have allowed them to search her.
I remember the day after 77 in 2005 at Hereford train station. I would often stop there and get a hot chocolate in the Cafe there. After coming back from the toilet, two uniformed guys approached me asking what I’m doing then told me I can’t come to the station if not getting on a train, can’t quite remember what my reply I was somewhat taken off guard. Of course, they had no right to stop me going about my business in a public place, but I was young and green I guess.
In theory, that’s right. In practice, “private” security guards are – according to first-hand information from a police officer – authorized to use whatever they believe to be reasonable force to get whatever they believe to be their job done. They could have pinned the woman to the ground and strip-searched her, followed by getting her arrested based on nothing but making wild claims to the police.
This may eventually result in “an embarrassing court case” but that’s not going to solve the immediate problem of someone who (innocently) fell into the clutches of these people.
Perhaps so. I may be stricken in years but I am still heavily muscled and trained in the arts of physical bodily harm. I would be pleased to be accused of something of which I am not guilty by some overweight champion of imaginary legal rights.
Shoplifters are people who are trying to steal goods from shops and not people about which some bit of intransparent piece of software whose workings is based on recording each and every shoppers face and then send the data for processing to an overseas (in all likeliness) data center for processing claims that they had stolen something from some shop in the past. This is absolutely outrageous as it amounts creating a universal automated ‘private’ surveillance system to punish people for crimes they didn’t commit.
The purpose of Facewatch is to harm people for not doing anything wrong. If that’s not already a criminal offence, it should certainly be made one and the people who invented this ‘service’ ought to be punished severely enough that future morons coming up with similar “business ideas” will be detained from actually putting them into practice.
“Have you been wrongly accused of a criminal offence by faulty face-recognition software? – Contact Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run for compensation”
Coming to TV screens soon.
It’s getting the same on Facebook and probably other social media platforms. It seems there are various bots masquerading as users, or possibly human users deploying AI, that trawl the membership to see if their comments and profile look like the canonical sceptic created during the AI training. If they match, the bot taps them on the shoulder and they are led away to a FB police station and won’t be released unless they can identify motorcycles and explain why they upticked a remark by Donald Trump during his presidential election campaign.
The next step will be to couple the facial recognition to an automatic assassination robot disguised as a friendly yellow dog, thereby triggering the Base Rate Fallacy problem.
Assuming my twin brother (I don’t have) murdered his spouse and escaped from policy custody after his trial, am I to be arrested in lieu of him because of “facial recognition software”? Further assuming I am, for how often? Everytime I walk past another police “white van”?
Some of Hitchhock’s movies are based on mistaken identity. Google tells me that The Wrong Man is one such example, but that has a happy-ish ending. In the one I have in mind but of which I have forgotten the title there is a downbeat ending in which the person fails to convince anybody, including his wife, dog and employer, that he is who he is, and becomes completely cancelled into a void.
That reminds me of a film I saw in the 1980s as a child, where a women is pretending to be someone’s wife, and the guy knows she is not his wife but cannot prove it. If that film sounds familiar, let me know.
Possibly Unconscious there’s a slightly more light-hearted one the other way around called Overboard.
Ah. Unconscious is a 2014 film… Maybe it’s a remake.
Cheers!
I like Goldie Hawn, and enjoyed watching her as a teen. if you know what I mean!
A rich friend bought himself a new soft-top BMW. We took the mickey about it being a bit late for a mid-life crisis.
He then got a speeding ticket through the post. He was just about to shrug and pay up and send off his licence when he realised it could not be him because he was out of the country at the time. He was then able to show that although the speeding car was similar to his, it was another car with cloned plates. After that his registration was on a watch list and he kept getting stopped all over the place. He was told by one officer that the other car had been involved in an incident where a passenger was standing up in the back seat ‘exposing himself’ as the car drove along. We fell about laughing.
What a total balls up, and I also think she should see a lawyer and hopefully take this shop to the cleaners. But who’s going to be pathetic enough to steal from Home Bargains though? It’s kind of on a par with nicking a midget gem from Woolies’ Pick ‘n Mix back in the day, stuffing it in your gob and hoping nobody noticed. Not that I’m speaking from experience. ( I was all about those white chocolate mice back then anyway ). Or even Pound Land. Imagine getting a criminal record for thieving something that cost one or two quid? The shame…
Anyways, was this lady of the non-white demographic? In which case she can just plead ‘racism’ or ‘reparations’ and she should be good as gold. In fact, she most likely wouldn’t have even been stopped in the first place. After all, everybody knows that if you’re the right colour you can carry a machete down your pants down the street or walk around a music venue with a camping-sized backpack, looking shifty and sweaty-lipped, and you’ll be left well alone. We’ve enough evidence to show this to be the case by now. Just don’t look remotely ‘far right’ and you’ll be golden.
I once took a strawberry bootlace. Felt terrible about it for weeks.
Sometimes Mogs…
Yet the elite plan to use this technology to control us.
The AI people are desperate for actually monetizing their carp. AFAICT, the only somwhat successful product they’ve come up with so far is to use AI chat programs and image generation for sexting-as-a-service. Quite a bit less ambitious than most of their plans so far have been. Hence, they’re mostly selling ‘magic’ to gullible fools.
Like the example here: It’s sold as shoplifting protection, as if some pattern recognition software considering two faces identical to each other would mean someone was about to commit a crime. In reality, it’s harassment-as-a-service for customers and executed by foolish and aggressive shop staff convinced that their employers have so many customers that it really doesn’t matter if they lose 1 or 2 or 200 or 2000 or whichever other number can be reached before this system is decomissioned on the grounds that it’s demonstrably harming the business and has no other demonstrable effects.
Live Facial Recognition or LFR. On the photo of the police notice at the top of the article, it says ‘there is no legal requirement to pass through the LFR system’.
But is it positioned in shops where the unwary customer has no choice but to pass through it when entering? Is there a warning notice before the customer passes through it?
If I saw such a warning notice when approaching, that shop would lose my custom. I object to being treated as a potential or proven thief as much as I objected to being treated as a potential terrorist by airport security.
In 2008 I was told to remove my cardigan, belt and shoes by a sniffy security officer. As a white woman in my sixties wearing light summer clothes covered by a cardigan to hide my elderly arms, I felt unfairly picked on and humiliated by being made to undress in public.
I swore then never to fly again and I never have.
If shops are going down this route of getting in our faces and making mistakes, I will do all my shopping online.(Yes, I know that Google et al spy on us all the time, but I am resistant to advertising.)
So tired of being ordered about and spied on in this increasingly authoritarian and intrusive society.