“sorry, you can’t buy food because of surveillance capitalism’s inherent violence”
Time to boycott.
What the fuck kind of business does a grocery store have to store people’s biometric data? Fuck that.
I have a senior data protection role in a public sector organisation. I actively do everything I can to prevent AI and biometrics being used except in the most innocuous of cases (eg letting people use chatgpt to help write stuff).
He said supermarket staff were unable to explain why he was being told to leave, and would only direct him to a QR code leading to the website of the firm Facewatch, which the retailer has hired to run facial recognition in some of its stores. He said when he contacted Facewatch, he was told to send in a picture of himself and a photograph of his passport before the firm confirmed it had no record of him on its database. “One of the reasons I was angry was because I shouldn’t have to prove I am innocent,” Rajah said. “I shouldn’t have to prove I’m wrongly identified as a criminal.” He described the incident as feeling “quite like Minority Report, Orwellian”. He said while doing his normal shop, he was approached by three members of the store’s staff, one of whom appeared to affirm that he was the person pictured on a device they had. It is understood the Facewatch system flagged someone else who had entered the store, and staff mistook Rajah for him. Rajah was concerned some form of permanent record implying he had been involved in criminality might have been created on Facewatch’s system. Eventually, the firm told him he was not on its database and referred him back to Sainsbury’s.
I remember reading something last year about how some of not most facial recognition software has racist biases because the models are primarily trained on Caucasian people. Based on just the name, I’m going to assume Rajeh is not white, and may be a victim of that bias. Granted, it shouldn’t be used at all, so it’s splitting hairs more than anything.
This shit needs to be heavily regulated, with massive fines for anyone who inconveniences a customer due to a false positive or a staff error such as what happened in this case.
If you read the story, you’ll see that it was face recognition by humans that was at fault, not automated face recognition. It would be like if the store had a picture posted in the staff room that said “Do not let this person shop here,” and the staff had thought this shopper was the guy in error.
That’s a bit of a stretch to say the system was not at fault. The system pops up an alert and says he this brown guy should not be in your store and shows a picture of a brown guy, staff go out and find a different brown guy and kick him out of the store. It’s still the system which is the issue, it scanned faces, sent and alert, but wasn’t able to accurately communicate to the staff which specific person they should be worried about. The staff aren’t facial recognition experts, the shitty system led to this issue occuring.
Corey Doctrow calls the humans in this loop reverse centaurs..
Edit: not unicorns
“Idiot Store Staff Mistake Someone For Someone Else” doesn’t get the same clicks.
Honestly don’t care too much about random super markets. This shit gets really fun when governments use it (like eg ICE is doing right now in the US).
I care about random supermarkets. People need to eat and obtain basic necessities even if some random database with no oversight says they might be dangerous in some way that we don’t get to know about.
Random super markets can license access to their data. I could easily imagine a company like Palantir or Flock leveraging systems like these in their government contracting. Whether or not these things are privately owned by creepy corporations or under the direct control of a government agency feels like a distinction without a difference, either way the infrastructure of totalitarianism is being constructed around us with these technologies.
When you’ll notice it, it will be too late.
Fuck Sainsburys
