Home Depot Sued for 'Secretly' Using Facial Recognition at Self-Checkouts

As someone living in Japan, the sheer number of instances of theft in your description shocks me. Is this that common there?

Some shoplifters don't care. There is no good trick that works on everyone.

>The registers is not where they need to be combating theft.

There is plenty of theft happening at the self-checkout registers as well, as it's very easy to do.

Came here hoping someone would mention those absolutely cursed cameras - the ones with the pre-canned video of a guy in a back office "monitoring" the feeds?

Gets to me the worst when I'm on my 3rd Home Depot trip of the day BEEP looking through a box of pipe fittings that is filled with everything _except_ the fitting matching the label on the box BEEP okay.. the Home Depot website says it's in stock at the one 20 minutes up the store BEEP but, that's what it said about BEEP the stock at this store so.. but hmm BEEP maybe I could combine these two other fittings and save a BEEP ... trip to the other store, okay I'll look here for... BEEP hmm, the two fittings I would need to combine also aren't in the right BEEP box, but... it looks like maybe there's some that someone put back into a BEEP different box? Oh, wait BEEP _none_ of these fittings are in their correct box? What!? BEEP

Sorry I've just never had anybody to talk with this about. I hate those things with a passion. Let me know if you'd like to start a support group.

Is this coming from legal definitions?

Because, one of the valid dictionary definitions of "recognition" is simply acknowledging something exists. No prior knowledge needed for that, other than the generic training the facial detection software has undergone.

but just think about other things.

Like the google 'incognito' mode that wasn't private browsing, and google was found guilty.

engineers might say "of course it's not private" but the court opinion differed.

common sense to a normal person might not match engineer thinking.

I'm pretty sure just like free speech, innocent until proven guilty is for the government/court, not a random person on the street. If you want to assume someone is guilty of something you are allowed to do so and you can sue too. Otherwise the prosecution would have to go to jail every time the defense wins.

No, it means courts can be used to find out if someone is guilty.

A forensic study… audit of the source code, firewall logs, and device storage would be enough information to determine if it is happening or not.

Absolute proof it could never happen? No, but we don’t need that.

Well, you can if you're suing a company or entity and there is a complete picture of the situation collected. This isn't a criminal case - I would not be surprised if this isn't about setting a precedent. The result clarifying boundaries for what can and what can't be done.

When they were first rolled out you had to weigh everything or get a person to come over _per item_ ... It was total Insanity.

They do indeed often have zero ordinary cashiers.

... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.

I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.

Exactly this, last time I went to HD I had a cart with maybe 20 items, NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands. Now I decided that if a place doesn’t have human cashiers I just don’t shop there and give priority to small stores, I might pay more but at least I know the profits are for a neighbor.

What store? I have not seen a single store with this setup.

In the U.S., particularly the Walmarts I've been to, cashiers are usually slower than the self-checkouts now.

Their self-checkouts used to be slow because the registers would verify the weight of items on the scale (the surface where you bag it) before letting you put it in the cart. If it didn't like the weight it would force you to put it back in the bag. I don't think they do this anymore. Asset protection can view a camera pointed at the scanner and bags if they think you're stealing.

Furthermore, it's hard for Walmart to retain people, so cashiers are treated like a dump stat. They won't really dedicate people to checking out anymore unless that's all they can do, e.g. elderly, so someone who's a cashier all day tends to be slow because they're accomodating that person. So you could be the fastest cashier in the world but it won't mean anything as far as raises, etc. Your fast cashiers are often pulled off and stocking unless its super busy.

I was a trained cashier many years ago because I didn't grow up privileged so I had to work retail (and dishwasher and waiter) jobs.

Not only do I have the muscle memory, still after 30 years, I also have the added incentive of knowing the value of my own time, not being fatigued from hours of work, the ability pre-position items in the cart at an optimal orientation for handling and scanning, and foreknowledge of what items I have and a plan for how best to bag them that was made prior to my arrival at self-checkout.

So, yeah, I scan faster.

Much faster.

edit: oh man this has brought up a bunch of frustrations. Why do customers just pile shit on the counter? When I interact with a cashier, like at a gas station on a long road trip, every item I place on the counter has the barcodes oriented towards the person, so they can just "zap zap zap zap" the items rapid-fire without handling them. My bag (I live in a civilized state that has banned plastic bags) is ready and waiting, items are organized and presented in an order that make sense for ease of bagging. My payment method is ready. The experience is efficient and quick.

It takes no mental effort to do any of this and yet I am constantly stuck behind people who act as though they are purchasing things for the first time in their entire lives and the process is as foreign to them as communicating in the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence is to me.

If the option is waiting in line for a cashier versus going to an open self checkout (this is almost always the case where I shop), then yes, self checkout is faster.

Even aside from the line, the only thing clerks are sometimes faster at in my experience is ringing up fresh produce where codes have to be typed in (these codes are usually on a label on the produce, but if not you have to go through a lookup procedure if you haven't memorized the code).

I spend less time in the self-checkout queue than in the cashier queue. Overall much faster. And I don't think that's just because the shops have chosen to have more self-checkouts, it's a matter of floor space - self checkouts are much denser so they can get much more throughput.

Trained cashier? The local Lowe's and HD have little old ladies running the checkouts. They can't even lift most of the things I am buying, and have to scan them myself.

Supermarkets usually have old slow people running them. The only time I don't use self checkout is when I have alcohol, and it is slower every single time than doing it myself.

The line for self-checkout is usually faster, often nonexistent. That easily eats any marginal benefit a fast cashier might offer for my 1 to 5 items.

In the specific case of Walmart I use the "scan and go" feature of their app, so I scan the items using my phone's camera as I take them off the shelf.

Bold of you to assume Walmart and the like train their cashier's on speed.

(I wish I was kidding; discounters that squeeze costs everywhere including cashier throughput seem to be the exception in retail.)

Even a trained cashier cannot scan as fast as a trained cashier on these systems; they're slow by design. I got reasonably fast (but not cashier fast) on Safeway's and hit a wall: I kept running into false positive "unidentified item in bagging area", followed by clerk overrides. I eventually figured out that you can't place the item into the bagging area until the computer has processed it — there's a delay between the "beep" of the barcode scanner recognizing a barcode and the computer adding the item to the tab & then announcing the purchase, and you cannot hit the scale prior to that or it gets out of sync with you.

Also the only place truly training cashiers, AFAICT, is Aldi's.

There is no evidence anecdotal or otherwise to back this assertion.

Many stores near me appeared to cut cashiers before they added self-checkouts. If anything, adding self-checkouts increased the number of available options to get out of the store faster.

I'd place my bets on curbside pickup getting pushed more before cashiers get added given how popular it's become as an option.

No, there wouldn't be. Having to have 15 people on staff and manage them and pay them is a big cost to the store owners. Self checkout machine costs $xx,000, amortized over 10 years, vs $15/hr and other overhead for a human being.

I use self checkout all the time and have never been accused of shoplifting. Other stores in other neighborhoods might be different, and I wouldn't be surprised if skin color makes a difference too.

Not sure what state you're in, but in most places you can just walk by then with zero legal issues (excluding contractual obligations like costco)

I was boycotting Kroger for a long time over a different thing they were doing. The self-checkouts (and a lot of the time there isn't another option) had a camera that watched what you put in your bag. If you didn't move what you scanned very slowly (the camera seemed to be running at <10 FPS) over the exact trajectory it expects it would demand an employee make sure you weren't stealing the thing you scanned. So every few items you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for an employee to notice you, be free to come over, decide they can be bothered, and go through everything.

They got rid of it eventually and I started shopping there again, but if they start doing receipt checks they're back on the shit list.

Do you not do the same with a cashier?

(This is getting tangential, but I do exactly what you describe, and I really appreciate that I can do it on my terms, without having to accommodate three other people: the one in front of me, the cashier, and the one next in line.)

No, not "do it three times". "Get fined for it three times." That's the key difference; there's feedback from the system that's supposed to act as a corrective. What's being discussed here would be taking away someone's license sight unseen, with no previous lesser punishment having been administered.

The difference is that you are informed and penalised each time, rightly giving you the option to change your behaviour. A police officer following a speeder to deliberately have enough offences to take their license immediately would be at least frowned upon in most jurisdictions.

Do you have ANY evidence that sending someone to jail for a few months to a few years sets people on a straight path?

I am pretty sure the evidence shows the opposite.

I feel like if the rules are going to change like this, they should change fairly. A few months in jail for what would have been petty crime if not for the repetition seems excessive. If right now there's a lower cash value threshold for prosecution, the fair thing is that there should be a lower rate threshold. For example, someone shouldn't be jailed for stealing a thousand dollars worth of batteries over the course of ten years, I don't think.