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I wonder who provides them this tech. A friend of mine quit a company because they were developing a VERY similar technology a few years back. He "lovingly" called it RPaaS (Racial Profiling as a Service). He went WAAAY above his pay grade to protest against the creation of the product and it ultimately ended in him sending a letter of resignation.
Please express my admiration for your friend's actions here. We need more people like him.
So that’s why everything is expensive
Everything is expensive because there exist people who are willing to stand by their values?
Given the context, I suppose it's because people are stealing things and thus stores have to raise their prices?
Shitty* values but yes, try to keep up.
we can keep up with well-reasoned arguments, it's just that the words that you're typing are incoherent. i guess we can assume that you think racial profiling is ok and being against it is "shitty"?
More people who make fascile pleas inevitably resilting in hopeless failure?

I think it would be better to actually change things. This and other everyday examples show that this means overcoming capitalism.

We need more people who are unwilling to do work that they think is harmful in exchange for a paycheck.
I think you’re being unfairly harsh. It’s good for workers to refuse to carry out orders that are unethical. Ideally, such actions would be carried out collectively by a union branch or some other worker organisation. But if that’s not feasible, the next best thing is for individuals to push back on unethical initiatives.

Also, not everyone agrees that the best way to counter the ills of capitalism is to replace the whole system with something else that may be better but could be worse (in different ways). Being so casually dismissive of such people’s effort to improve things within capitalism means they won’t ever be interested in ideas that go beyond reformism.

Overcoming capitalism or overcoming the concept of value? They did this because they felt that the value they could recoup from shoplifters/deterrence was more than the cost of building and maintaining this system. None of that requires capitalism.
Report this shit to your congresscritters who care. They may not even be in your district or in your state, but there are congresscritters who care about racial profiling like this. And they'll raise a stink.

Especially if you give them juicy details and a nifty new acronym they can get headlines with.

> with “largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods” serving as the technology testbed.

There's been plenty of articles pointing out that certain demographics are very under-represented in training sets, leading to all kinds of errors [1] [2].

Technological advances aside, the company should have clearly disclosed their use of facial recognition technology - concealing that raises serious privacy issues.

1: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/04/1034368231/facebook-apologize...

2: https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-...

Is there any law requiring disclosure of facial recognition?

Should there be?

I don't know if there is, but don't think so? I think there probably should be -- but also, it'll be just another fine-print fades-into-landscape thing. All the signs about video monitoring don't really matter much, we just assume there's video monitoring everywhere and don't even notice the signs anymore. I assume facial recognition will soon be the same, unless it is regulated beyond requiring disclosure.

There are a number of state laws but the last time I checked the one in Illinois (which requires affirmative consent to do facial recognition) is the only effective one because it contains what’s called a “right of private action” - if the state does not sue a company you (each individual plaintiff) can sue for $5k statutory damages (which can make class actions a huge threat even to rich tech cos).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/opinion/illinois-biometri...

Yeah any warning system will just turn into California’s prop ~~86~~ 65, which led every building in the state to add signage reading “this building may or may not contain cancer-causing chemicals.” Which is completely useless.
One difference is that it's hard to know if you have the chemicals in your building, or be able to eliminate them.

Knowing that you have facial recognition and eliminating it is much easier.

I think there definitely should be. I wouldn't want to set foot in a place that did this, and would be really angry if I discovered that a place was secretly doing this because it would rob me of my ability to protect myself.
If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea?

[1] https://github.com/usnistgov/frvt/blob/nist-pages/reports/1N...

[2] https://careers.riteaid.com/pages/company-info

I'm not defending Rite-Aid at all, but that's not the problem here.

It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person.

Facial recognition software should always be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is always necessary.

(What you're talking about is 1,280 false positives a day, or less than 1 per store per day.)

Again -- not defending Rite-Aid here. Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it.

"It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person."

I would contest that. Determining if someone is the same person as a low-quality photo is not necessarily something a human can do, and that's especially true if the human in question A: basically doesn't care and is likely to screw it up every way it is possible to screw it up and B: is influenced by whether or not they're willing to directly confront someone who is nominally a criminal while they're being paid the de facto local minimum wage.

This plan is all sorts of infeasible and frankly stupid, and the purely human concerns are sufficient for that determination even before we add the tech in.

You are correct. In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... this 2014 study showed a 15% error rate (with photos from identification documents, high-quality standardized photos, not low-quality random angle ones!), and the real kicker is passport officers (who do this as part of their job all day and presumably care about doing it well) surprisingly performed no better than random undergrads...

https://qz.com/251791/passport-officers-are-no-better-at-per...

(Someone is now going to suggest, right, that's why we should have computers do it instead, bringing the circle back around again... but just no).

Why is the photo in your imaginary scenario low quality?

Why do you think the plan is "infeasible and stupid"? You don't think the technology will catch up?

> .. then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person

Yes - but the "approach and identify" of false positives/innocent people was the actual embarrassment and harassment that the system got banned for, it was the human review (asking for ID etc) that was the issue.

But it seems like they went straight to approaching and asking for ID.

What about the step where it shows a human photos from original footage and current footage and they get to say, nope I'm not confident?

Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that facial recognition needs a human verification layer before taking any action at all. The fact they weren't doing that is just one part of why their actions were wrong.

Wouldn’t it depend on how many accurate positives there were? If it’s one false positive against nine real positives, great. If it’s one false positive a day for a month before a real match occurs, nobody will pay any attention at all.
Drugstores like Rite-Aid often encounter multiple shoplifters a day.

Assuming most of them are repeat, then there are going to be more true positives than false positives.

(Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that the statistics aren't the issue.)

> It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person.

Yeah, that's not going to happen in any meaningful sense with ordinary employees. Asking them to make a judgement call like that will just result in employees erring on the side of "it could be them, so I confirm" rather than "I'm not sure it's them, so I don't confirm"

When “I confirm” isn’t just a button but a face-to-face accusation I’d expect people would choose to err in the other direction.
> Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it.

I think that an understanding of basic statistics still eludes a lot of people. Teaching it should be prioritized as much as teaching algebra. There are a lot of interesting real-life examples of how we get confused or tricked with statistics, enough to even keep the attention in class of the average high-schooler.

Just a reminder that the "1 per store per day" is an innocent human being who probably would have been put through hell on earth by what you considered an acceptable rate of error.
You're missing the parts where I said twice that I wasn't defending the practice.
What is "hell on earth" to you?

Cops have probable cause and search you. Find no evidence. "Oh boy sorry for the mix up sir". Hell on earth!

>human review is always necessary

Then why have AI?

Does this mean I can log into 8/10,000 iphones?
As opposed to the alternative?
Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704830
I missed that previous post, and frankly this is important enough to justify being one the front page again. Especially with the amount of irrational love heaped on AI snake oil salespeople here
That's a different article from a different source
Does this ban them from using all facial recognition software or just the software they used, which are two very different things.

Also, I think ppl would be surprised at the number of places that use this type of sw (maybe not ppl here.) Walmart has amazing sw that id's ppl before they even enter the store and regularly work with LE in helping find ppl.

Can we get checkout video recording out of other grocery stores too?
I just want a hard expiration on it, something like a 48-hour horizon for the video and any data derived from it.