Kmart's Use of Facial Recognition to Tackle Refund Fraud Unlawful

And sometimes it’s just a different store that licensed the name for 100 years.

Which also now owned by the same owners of Kmart (Coles Group, now owned by Wesfarmers).

And both Kmart and Target Australia operations have merged (though still operating 2 separate brands)

The root comment is precisely right. Deriving data from filmed content -- the illusory private biometric data that we are leaving everywhere, constantly -- is what the purported transgression was.

The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.

The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:

> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?

https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/blog/is-there-a-place-for-facia...

I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable. It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.

I'm not worried about people collecting IPs, I'm worried about people who collect IPs being able to send those IPs out and get them associated with names, and send those names out and be supplied with dossiers.

When they start putting collecting IPs in the same bag as the rest of this, it's because they're just trying to legitimize this entire process. Collecting dossiers becomes traffic shaping, and of course people should be allowed to traffic shape - you could be getting DDOSed by terrorists!

edit: I'm not sure this comment was quite clear - it's 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem. IPs are just temporary identifiers, unless you can resolve them through what are essentially civilian intelligence organizations.

We are all potential criminals under tomorrow's government. Remember that!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

I'd be worried that they will either collaborate or get infiltrated by hackers, cops, and agencies. Then, one day I like a post on social media promoting wrongthink, and I'll be picked up.

The ad network absolutely knows you down to minute detail, but the only thing that matters is who bid the highest. Maybe the winner is the one with the most VC cash to burn?

I believe it. But it wasn't super-advanced surveillance. It was, as I recall, 2010's "machine learning" basically drawing inferences about purchase history to determine what sorts of personalized advertisements to mail to you or print on your receipts, or whatever.

I believe it because I worked at another large American retailer similar to Target at the time and though I was not directly involved, I was aware that other departments in our company were working on similar things. It wasn't that advanced or outlandish, it was just finding trends in the huge amount of historical purchase data we had. I can absolutely believe that it was similar at Target. People who bought these things typically bought baby-related stuff 3-6 months later, so lets send them some coupons for that baby-related stuff in 2 months. It's unlikely the fact it was baby-related was actually relevant, it probably just sent coupons for whatever the predicted purchases were.

An individuals purchase history was probably correlated either by rewards program membership (preferred) or credit cards used. If you just paid cash and didn't use swipe your membership card, it was unlikely the purchase would be associated to you.

Where is the difference?

Everyone trying to enter K-mart is trying to enter K-mart just like the night club. Everyone going into the night club is not there to drink/meet someone/dance/use the restroom/make a drug deal Just like not everyone going into K-Mart is there to shop/browse/by a snack/get a refund/steal something

That's what Trump/MAGA america wants. They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime. They will gleeful cheer it on.

A Walmart in AZ has sent gigantic bouncers after me to detain me on suspicion of shoplifting a $5 bag of cat litter. In my state they are allowed to kidnap/imprison you until police arrive if they have 'reasonable suspicion' you're in the act of shoplifting, so yeah have fun guessing whether the guy with the walmart badge is actually security or just a rapist.

First of all; in times long past, retailers had zero shoplifting incidents, because every order was fulfilled by their employees, who would pick from the stock room and present the customer with a ready-to-take bag of their goods, and a purchase receipt. Shoplifting in this context was basically impossible.

The advent of customers picking out their own goods let to the introduction of customers attempting to leave the store without paying, but it also saved retailers incredible amounts of money, not having to pay to have employees both stock and pull orders.

However, because nothing is ever profitable enough, much further down the line (and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows) we get self checkouts, which are basically honor boxes with speakers. And that's fine, I love self checkout and my only complaint with it is now retailers are over-reliant on it, and, again in the name of cost-cutting, have 6 to 10 registers overseen by one worker, who has to sprint between them to sort out when the stupid things can't detect a light item, or have a conniption fit when you don't place a 75" television on them, and of course they have to also make sure all of those registers are ringing up the correct items, which has itself then given rise to bag checkers at the door.

And to be clear, I'm not like, endorsing any particular system here. I don't care how stores want to convey products to me terribly, just make it clear what the fuck I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. What I am saying is retail theft is largely enabled by retailers who do nothing but chase the bottom line and constantly try and make their stores work with fewer and fewer people who are less and less skilled over time and are then SHOCKED when someone just takes something, because their ludicrously under-staffed stores are incredibly easy to steal from, if you want to.

And I would ALSO point out that throughout this long history, the cost of slippage has been built into the business, because theft is far, far from the only reason a product that is purchased wholesale may not make it all the way to a paying customer. Retail supply chains and especially grocery ones are simply AWASH in waste, and somehow, all the time, these stores make money.

So no, as a customer and taxpayer, I don't particularly give much of a shit about shoplifting.