USPS Service Kiosks Taking Pictures of Customers

NW writes "According to FOIA documents obtained by EPIC new Postal Service self-service postage machines take portrait-style photographs of customers and retain them for 30 days." IBM is the contractor behind the kiosks. Note that the kiosk is supposed to not complete the transaction if it determines the photograph has been compromised, so simply covering the camera is unlikely to work. As the cost of cameras and digital storage approaches zero, is it inevitable that every machine you interact with will take your photograph and store it?

Comments

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[squiggleslash]

I don't think many people are consciously aware that the CCTV systems in stores are generally recorded. Yes, on a technical level, they probably know, but it's not something they think about. The mental picture most of us have seeing a CCTV camera is of a bank of monitors somewhere in the building being watched by a security guard.

As far as the ATM example goes, that's different. We know that the ATM is taking pictures to protect us. It's the bank's security system implemented on our behalf. It means if someone steals our card and uses it, there's a greater chance of catching the culprit.

The Post Office situation is a little bit wierd. We've never had a system that guarantees a picture of the sender will be associated with a particular bit of mail, still more that the sender would be unaware of this. It has implications, good and bad. It's a little disconcerting the implementers were so secretive about it that it required a FOIA request to get the information.

Yay!

[Alioth]

I worked on the software (the retail bit of it, not the bit that takes photographs - when I was on the project, that bit wasn't even there) for this piece of kit.

We had some great fun with the coin machine. We had bags of coins plus the coin/bill acceptor for testing. When work had been going on too long, I used to like emptying the acceptor of everything but pennies, then buying a 1c stamp with a $20 bill. The thing went off like a machine gun firing out pennies, it was friggin' cool.

It also did a bit of a Las Vegas style jackpot dispense with all of them full - in change it could give (IIRC, it was 1998 when I worked on the software for the pilot) quarters, nickels, pennies and Susan B dollars. (It didn't dispense dimes. I was told because dime dispensing is unreliable, and the machine tended to choke on them). Again, 1c stamp with a $20 bill, and Ker-ching - it simultaneously fired coins from all four coin stores.

At least I worked out what to do with surfeit pennies - instead of keeping them in a jar or bagging them up and paying one of those machines to count them, you can spend 1c coins in the postal vending machines (or could when I was working on them). Great way of getting rid of your shrapnel.

BTW: Whenever you take a package to a post office, if it's got IBM kit, you're using my code. I wrote the scale driver (amongst other things).

Disclosed at introduction and touted as a feature

[briantf]

When those kiosks went in to the local Post Office, they had a greeter who explained their function and features. It was explicity part of the "script" that the transaction was accompanied by a photograph for security purposes.

Seems to me someone needs some PayPal donations to subsidize their fight for your freedom so they announced this as an FOIA issue. Oh, what do you know, donations are the first item on their main page!