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Borders to Use CCTV Face Recognition
albanach writes: "This story at the Sunday Herald newspaper says Borders Bookshop is to become the world's first retailer to use face recognition software linked to their in-store CCTV cameras to automagically identify known shoplifters."
If it will contain only those who have been convicted of shoplifting, then surely this is wrong; our system of justice is based on the concept that once someone has paid the penalty for their crime, they have reformed and should no longer be punished further. If it will contain those accused of shoplifting, but not prosecuted, then Borders will be acting as judge and jury without any proper process.
Who is to vet this database? Will the database be shared with other retail establishments who want to implement a similar system?
I find the whole idea deeply, deeply troubling.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As much as I support the proposed anti-video surveillance law as it applies to surveilence on public property, I can't find fault with the Borders arrangement. If they feel it will reduce instances of shoplifting, more power to them, although I'd like to see if they can get any shoplifter they catch, to pose for a picture (unless they have been arrested and charged). If borders expects to hold shoplifters they catch, expressly for the purpose of taking their photo for addition to their system, that will prove legally problematic for them.
The public has a right to be angered by public surveilence as was done at the Super Bowl but if you don't like being surveiled on provate property, don't enter that private property. It's as simple as that.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up, because I wasn?t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up, because I wasn?t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
The erosion of individual rights progresses in small, almost imperceptible steps. Rather like placing a lobster in a pot of cold water while large coorportations and govornments slowly turn up the heat
We get comfortable, get complacent, fall asleep.... and then become mere objects for someone else to devour as they see fit.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.
--Lord Alexander Tyler on the fall of the Athenian republic
Do you recognize our place in this sequence? Are we somehow immune from the lessons of history? Somehow I doubt it.
Anonymous cuz I'm lazy
Because the issue isn't whether the watchees are doing anything wrong. I'ts whether the watchers are doing anything wrong.
Enhanced surveillance technology is almost never accompanied by enhanced accoutablility for the operators of that technology. (Be it governments, corporations or spies.) These systems are being deployed with no concern for the fact that they upset balances of interest that have been carefully formed over centuries.
Those who claim that these are not new powers are wrong. The data correlation provided by networked and shared computer databases is a fundamentally new capabality. Comparing this new capability to a cop watching for known criminals on the street is like comparing a nuclear weapon to a hand grenade. At some point in the future, having your face in one of these databases will be like having an emblem sewed on your sleeve in Nazi Germany.
First of all, Borders is legally within their rights to do this. The store is private property, and they're perfectly within their rights to do this. Hell, I think it would even be legal for them to say something to say, "no customers of skin color X allowed", although the public relations disaster would destroy them instantly (note: they couldn't do the same for employees).*
OTOH, different laws and standards apply to what governments can do. City streets are public property, not private. It's highly inappropriate for the government to forcibly take your money (taxation), then use it to institute machine surveillance of you and other innocent citizens.
I used to work at a grocery store, and, if we ever caught a shoplifter, we would make them sign something acknowledging their crime, and make them promise never to enter one of our stores again. If they did, we'd prosecute. Enforcement was left to in-store detectives, and I can tell you they weren't 100% accurate. Even if the occasional false alarm happens with the Borders system, it only has to be better than a detective to be worth-while and a benefit to everybody.
The appropriate response to a "positive" ID by this face recognition system is closer surveillance by humans. If a human confirms that the person in question is a previous shoplifter, then they should be asked to leave. If, on the other hand, Guido and his rent-a-cop friends immediately start beating you with the Webster Unabridged New English Dictionary because their system beeped, then you can sue them. If it offends you on principle, shop elsewhere.
Here's a quick summary of why this is different than the Tampa situation:
Somebody in an earlier message said something to the effect that it's not right to further persecute shoplifters who have already been prosecuted and done their time. Of that person, I ask, if somebody stole from you, did a few weeks in jail, then was released, would you feel obligated to let him back in your house? Why should it be any different for Borders?
*Generally, private organizations are allowed to discriminate with their membership on racial, religious, or sexual lines. Obviously, the Catholic Church down the street isn't legally obliged to allow Church of Satan members to join, even if denying them constitutes religious discrimination. Gyms are allowed to restrict their customer base to women-only. If they can do that, then bookstores can restrict customers to people who aren't in their database of shady characters. When you start employing people for money, then different laws apply.
Remember back in the day when you could just walk into a store, drop a not-insignificant amount of money at the register, and then walk out of the store with an item you just bought? Seems quaint, no? Nowadays, after your purchase you get to stand in yet another line while a puke with an attitude and a pink magic marker signs his name ("X") on your receipt and "authorizes" your exit with your personal property. The entire legal concept of quid pro quo has been turned on its ear to accommodate these pink X's--we apparently no longer own the item when we exchange money for it, but rather the store can demand that you produce proof that your property didn't magically turn back into the store's property in the 10-foot walk from the register to the door. Remember the indignation we all used to feel at being treated like criminals just so a store Fry's Electronics could cut down on cash-register fraud? (Apparently, it's much less expensive to alienate customers than to just pay the employees enough to make them value their jobs). Remember how we all vowed never to shop in such a place anymore? Now this behavior is endemic--like the sheep we are, we accept it for that extra 5% off the purchase price.
Be sure you get rankled now. Five years from now, when the only place that'll sell you food is a urine-stained 7-11 in Compton because your face is a 92.4% match to a convicted felon in Joliet, you'll be forced to accept it. By then it'll be too late.
"If you don't do anything wrong, you have nothing to fear."...
So, what you're saying is that they should stop arresting shoplifters because they might arrest you one day?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Jesus Christ. Is there something going on here that I don't know about? Some sort of contest to see who can produce the most overwrought and disproportionate response?
Free clue: this is not the holocaust, this a system to prevent shoplifting. If you are unsure of the difference, allow me to help you out: this is what the holocaust looked like.
See the difference?
The Niemoller quote is not really apropos, you're essentially putting some sort of parallel between shoplifters and Communists, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Slippery slope you're on there.
AC's cheerfully ignored
No it isn't.
This is a store buying a database from a company that peddles accusations. If the system grows in popularity and most stores implement this, the database company gains quasi-governmental powers but without the checks and balances built into governments.
Inclusion in the database (rightly or wrongly) becomes a form of extra-legal punishment, imposed regardless of any due process punishments already applied by the real government to the offender (or mistaken non-offender).
Like I said originally, it's not each individual store that's the problem. It's the network effect when all stores share accusations in real time via a secret database.
If the thieves stop going to those stores because they bet profiles, maybe prices will drop
Oh my god but you are naive!!
I have a friend who works in a bookstore in an upper-class mall. Their standark mark-up is 1000% (sic). They are doing very well, they are opening more branches - in other words, customers cough up, thats the status quo. If you think prices might drop, I have a bridge to sell you.
Your post is naive on so many other counts too (e.g. should a reformed, punished criminal who once made a mistake as a teenager, trying to get on with his/her life keep paying for his/her crime forever? and who is "watching the watchers"? who prevents abuse of the system? and what happens when this technology becomes so pervasive in 20-40 years time that nobody can make a move without being both watched and permanently recorded? what sort of effect does that have on the psyche of individuals and on how they behave?) .. I'll skip going into detail since others have already made those points quite well.
Next it might be any shoplifters
Actually, one of the next steps is most likely going to be in the field of gesture/behaviour recognition. Granted, its probably in the region of five to twenty years from actual commercial products, but long-term, I plan to be living on this planet much longer than that. The general idea is that image-processing software will examine the CCTV image, and in real-time attempt to characterize and describe what you are doing. So the software might be able to determine itself with reasonable probability whether or not you are attempting to shoplift. It might characterize "suspicious behaviour", and not unthinkably, "pedophile behaviour". Basically, anything that a human watcher is capable of doing, software is theoretically capable of doing as much at a minimum, and potentially more.
This type of software already exists (I worked with some researchers doing this several years ago), and while it is still somewhat primitive, it won't be for too much longer. In general there seems to be a dearth of long-term thinking here on /. (and in the general populace actually)
The software will almost certainly be able to record facial signatures, one relatively benign use of which would be to identify repeat customers (a real-life cookie), but I'm sure anyone with a bit of imagination could come up with less benign uses. Compare, for example, to the web-tracking techniques in use today - since the majority of banner ads on the web are served by a tiny handul of companies, the use of cookies can be used to "track" web surfer movements, building a database. It would only take a few affiliations between such companies and companies on the web who know your actual identity for them to connect their surfing-habit database to specific individuals. Fast-forward to 2030 - now almost any shop you enter has a CCTV system, and a tiny handful of companies provide this service to all shops. By networking the systems (computer technology will have improved a lot by then), these companies could now track individuals as they moved through various shopping malls. A database of your mall-surfing habits, even your purchasing habits. A few clever affiliations (e.g. with some stores who have "member cards"), and suddenly these companies can associate the facial-signature/mall-surfing database with a specific persons identity. Some more imagination required to extrapolate what might follow from that ..
Which of course, begs the question, if three quarters of their theft is internal why are they monitoring customers instead of their employees?
On top of that, in most of the Borders I've been in, most employees do not respond to the beeping security gate at the entrance. Half the time they wave the patron through! Perhaps if they stationed a security employee at the door to check those instances (ala Best Buy) maybe that level of security would actually be effective.
I still don't see the problem with this. I'm for any business enacting any policy they please within the confines of their store.
What if they could perform random searches of your person? Your car? (Hey, it's in their lot!) Unlikely? Of course. But what if this became widespread and unavoidable? (as a lot of the video monitoring we find commonplace today was 30 years ago) When does it become too intrusive?
If you don't want to be watched, don't go there, and make it a habit to write letters about it to advertisers and distributors.
I always preferred Borders to Barnes & Noble, but I'm switching now (with a handwritten letter to both to let them know why!).
I don't mind it a bit, since I haven't done anything wrong. If they want to watch me closer because they think I'm a thief, good for them.
Would you mind if a security guard followed you around the store? Would you mind being randomly searched by a Borders supervisor in the middle of your browsing? Would you allow the police to search your car without a reason? What about your house without a warrant? You've done nothing wrong, so you shouldn't mind, right? I'm sorry but I will never understand this type of mentality. Just because you've done nothing wrong does NOT justify their intrusion. The burden of proof lies with them to prove your guilt, not with you, your innocence. If people's commitment to privacy only revolves around how inconvient a search is, then we have already lost.
If the thieves stop going to those stores because they bet profiles, maybe prices will drop.
And I bet I can walk on water and turn water to wine. Customer discounts winning over higher profits would only be a miracle.
If you want privacy, go get some acreage of land in the mountains and stay out of civilization. I don't see ANY privacy loss if you're as much at fault for entering THEIR private property.
See my comment above for my take on your mentality. Would it be okay for them to record and broadcast your conversations while in their store? Would it be okay for them to record you in the bathroom and broadcast that? Would it be okay for a hotel manager to watch your wife shower because you are renting his rooms? Just because you in on private property does not mean you do not have a reasonable expectation to privacy.
Its cameras on the street that worry me, but we get videotaped by ATMs and banks and at the McDonald's and the convenient store, whats so wrong with filtering those images so security can do a better job?
I am absolutely baffled why recording on public streets would bother you and recording at Borders does not. When did it become common thought that the (imagined) right to corporate profit trumps individual human rights? Corporations and businesses are legal fictions that exist at the leisure of the public, not the other way around. We seem to be forgetting this, at our own peril.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry