Slashdot Mirror
Tesco To Use Face Detection Technology For In-Store Advertising
TinTops writes "Tesco has sparked privacy concerns following its decision to install technology that scans shoppers' faces in order to display video advertising on screens at its petrol stations. The UK's privacy watchdog the ICO is looking into the technology. This is the first national rollout of the system, known as OptimEyes, which claims to recognize facial characteristics that determine a customer's gender and age in order to show more relevant video adverts on screens as they queue at the till. Simon Sugar, chief executive of Amscreen, the firm which sells the technology, has admitted it has connotations of science fiction, but is looking to increase its reach further. 'Yes, it's like something out of Minority Report, but this could change the face of British retail and our plans are to expand the screens into as many supermarkets as possible,' he said."
With a face like mine, I don't expect to see adverts for condoms.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hello Chief John Anderton!
Products that move to conveniently block the camera, smudged lenses, etc.
Time to wear a skimask when waiting in the checkout line! They will surely enjoy that!
Oh this won't escalate quickly into something evil.
Someone showing up looking like Queen Mother? At a Hot Topic? Let me go mircowave some pop corn first.
A few months ago, an acquaintance of mine mentioned something online about something stupid he did at the premises of a large store chain in the 90s. A few days ago, he got served with a notice of trespass and a legal note that if he set foot on $STORE's property in any state, that he would be arrested on site. There is no statute of limitations on bans with private property.
Here in the US, said facial technology would be probably used for arresting people the second they entered in the store, making notes about what people bought, and if they didn't buy enough, to have LP give them the bum's rush out. Or, just selling who comes in the store, so if someone buys cigs, that info gets sold to their health insurance company.
I wonder what ads I'll see when I wear my Richard Nixon Halloween mask? (Does any even sell reel-to-reel tape anymore?)
To me, that's something out of COD: Black Ops 2. Right before I see some stoners get shot to the sound of Skrillex.
that the CCTV camera in the corner is trying to find out who they are
That is a sensationalistic quote. There is a huge gap between being identified as "Joe Klovance" and "middle aged white male". All they are trying to do is classify the face not identify it. This is not facial recognition attached to a database of faces. This is no different than a clerk waling up to people in different demographics and pointing out different sales that may interest them. That it is done by computer rather than a person is irrelevant.
Targeted advertising? But not on a computer? Revolutionary...maybe they can patent it.
Great. Now how long until I can get an "ad-blocker" that, with Google Glass, automatically detects and filters out this obtrusive advertising. Because right now I'm using an older analog method (closing my eyes) and I keep bumping into things.
My local grocer has TVs next to each till that shows nothing but adverts. I used to turn them off by pushing the power button on the front. Then they wised up and replaced them with new models that didn't have power buttons. I'm guessing I wasn't the only one who did that ;-)
And they wonder why people wear Burquas.
Mohammed, at the cutting edge of the consumer fight back
Simon Sugar, chief executive of Amscreen, the firm which sells the technology, has admitted it has connotations of science fiction, but is looking to increase its reach further. 'Yes, it's like something out of Minority Report, but this could change the face of British retail and our plans are to expand the screens into as many supermarkets as possible,' he said."
That is the worst-failed attempt at reassurance I've ever read 8-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There is a requirement for the person to take any notice of advertising, and secondly if I'm at the checkout I'm not going back for something that makes me go "ooh, shiny".
It's just a generic analysis, not recognizing you per se. Which is worse?
"You could use some glasses cleaner or a hair brush."
"Sale on Depends!"
"You look stupid. Aisle six has books."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Hello Mr. Yakamoto and welcome back to the GAP!"
Just don't put your horse mask on and hang around the meat section.
Nullius in verba
A Shell station I used to go to at another job had brand new pumps installed in 2008. These "new" and "improved" pumps would start playing ads the second you took the nozzle off the cradle and started pumping.
Result? I haven't been to that station in 7 years. To hell with intrusive adverts to a captive audience.
Boycott the store, people. Don't buy there. There is no greater "fuck you" to a merchant than an empty till and a competitor's store full of what used to be your own customers.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I avoid retailers who put video ads in my face while I'm queued.
video adverts
on screens
as they queue at the till
That's horrible! I'm surprised they haven't chased all their customers away already.
Suppose I get a T-shirt with a life-size face printed on it. And one on the back, too, so it'll think it's got my attention when I'm facing away. Or maybe there's a new reason to wear Muslim headscarves here. Another possibility is bizarre face makeup or tattoos will be the next in thing for the 20-somethings. Extra eyes, confusing shapes, etc.
In the new Argos 'stores of the future', they are going to use cameras with face recognition technology to keep customers from going to/in places they shouldn't (they feed the employee's faces to the machine to distinguish between employee and customer). It will announce to the person that they are in the wrong area and ask them to go back to the shop floor.
I don't really see the reason for this, I've never noticed a customer go somewhere considered out of bounds for a customer which makes me think its more for tracking employees.
Personally, I believe most of their vision of the future is stupid and I'm hoping it blows up in their faces.
I won't. Hopefully more and more people will learn what they're doing and choose to shop elsewhere as well.
Those I can live with, but I draw the line at haikus.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ads for guns and ammunition?
As long as you tape over your web cam lens when you order online.
"Yes, it's like something out of Minority Report, but this could change the face of British retail...
I see what you did there.
Ask your customers how they feel about losing my business because of your creepy and intrusive technology. Unless there's an easy to activate STFU button, I will take my business elsewhere.
Locate electrical plug for screen + speakers. Unplug. Keep shopping.
Remember when M$ or HP or something came out with Windows logins via facial recognition... and it didn't work on black people?
I wonder if they tested with anyone besides pale skins in the advert department.
Long hair that covers the face....
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
in order to show more relevant video adverts
There's your mistake right there. They think that there is such a thing as a relevant advert.
Hint: If it were relevant, I would've looked for it on Google already.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As one of the better retail consultants points out to retailers, you have a customer there all ready to give you their money and you're making them wait. That's a terrible mistake for a retailer. It means some people will go elsewhere next time. Some will even abandon their cart and walk out. Most retailers fail to get this.
One that does is The Gap. Notice that at a Gap store, there is no checkout clutter. There are no checkout-area displays. No impulse-buy items. There's a lot of empty counter space at checkout, and usually more than one check-out clerk. This encourages customers to bring multiple items to checkout, and discourages walk-outs because there's a line. Gap is very profitable despite a rather dull product line in a mature industry.
(This is also true on-line, which is why Amazon's "one click" checkout was so valuable an idea.)
Made the mistake of going into a Bed Bath & Beyond recently. They have LCD screens with speakers playing ads set up everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. There's dozens in an aisle. Stand in the middle of an aisle, and you're assaulted on all sides by loud, tinny, high pitched ads. You cannot go anywhere in the store without being in range of at lest five of them.
While I (almost) understand selling premium aisle space to one or two companies to plug an adbox-- this was beyond ridiculous. A pure example of company greed mixed with advertiser childish need to be heard.
So while my wife hunted for the items we needed (not either of our choice, wedding gifts), I amused myself by walking up and down the aisles, unplugging the things. They were all just these cheapass LCD screens you would buy from Walmart. Cheap shit consumer crap, lowest possible cost (with horrifically shitty sound, further driving up the annoyance factor). Shows just how much the advertisers care about quality. Anyways, they're all powered by standard AC adapters plugged in to the side by those little round plugs. So walk around, take a quick look, and yank. One down. I think I got about dozen of them, and the aisles were so much quieter.
Try it out next time you're stuck in this situation. It's great fun. And really, what's the minimum wage stockperson going to do even if they see you? Do you think they get any of that sweet money the store gets from sucking the advertiser's cock? They're probably just as annoyed at being exposed to this noise NON STOP for their entire shift. And even if they aren't-- the store ain't paying them nearly enough to care.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
In New Jersey and Oregon you are not allowed to pump your own gas.
I hope to never see this tech this side of the pond. A Sunoco station opened up near my home years back a block from a Hess. The pumps have one of those annoying video screens that plays adverts. To make it worse, the Sunoco architect thought it was a good idea to put three pumps in a row with no space between aisles to get between cars parked at the outer pumps. So you are stuck in the middle waiting if you finish filling or the middle pump is empty. Moronic setup.The Hess gets my money as their pumps have no screens and the layout is four rows of two pumps so there is never an in between pump.
In the UK some shops sue their customers if they suspect them of shoplifting. No trial, either pay up, face harassment for the "debt", or go to court and pay to defend yourself. They prefer it to reporting the crime to the police since they don't have to offer conclusive proof, and the police really don't give a fuck about people stealing from Tesco anyway.
Presumably once facial recognition is widely available the major chains will get together and blacklist people completely from most high streets (which only contain chain stores).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From what I've read elsewhere, these will be placed inside the shop.
All Tesco petrol pumps have "Pay at Pump" where a card reader is built into the pump, so there's never a need to go into the shop.
Besides, Asda is usually a little cheaper in my area.
If everyone brings a roll of tape, and tapes over all the cameras, no ads might be shown, and the system will become unprofitable very quickly. Hopefully the cams need to be close by...
Presumably once facial recognition is widely available the major chains will get together and blacklist people completely from most high streets (which only contain chain stores).
That's assuming that the big supermarkets want to cooperate on CCTV sharing, they already share it with other stores, just not rival stores. They would blame it on data protection law liability despite the motor insurance industry happily sharing data among rivals.
Why have checkout lines and staff. We can install self serve kioks and provide no staff(or one staff for loss prevention and "assistance"). We save expenses ergo increase profits and we can tell the sheeple that it 'saves them money'.
Only now there are queues to the self checkout kiosks. The individual checkout process is slower because the user/customer must learn each store's discreet system and, unlike the checkout girl, isn't nearly as fast at scanning and correcting the process. It's as if they have something else to do rather than run a register all day long. That's all assuming that the self serve checkout scanner works rather than being unable to scan an item forcing the user to stop the whole process, backing up the queue worse than an old lady writing a check, until assistance can arrive and call for help or, take them over to a "classic" register and ring everything up there.
Progress! Take it bitch!
The captcha says: "Cranky" - You're damned right!
This is certainly how it works with Casinos. Display enough skill to win against the house, and you don't just get thrown out of the casino, you get a ban in casinos around the world, across multiple chains, based on facial biometrics.
A niche problem in casinos. A major civil liberties issue if applied to supermarkets and malls.
that he would be arrested on site.
Argh. I desperately want to go grammar nazi on that, but technically it's not wrong even though it's obviously not what he meant. Someone is wrong on the internet, but I can't mock them because they're accidentally right.
Tony Blair has tens of these projects rolling out across the UK, each one using a FAKE advertising cover story. Britain was the first nation on the planet to install face recognition cameras at ALL transport hubs- cameras easily identified because they positioned to watch very NARROW fields of view with fixed focus lenses pointing at every movement choke point- especially at every stairway/escalator. Crime prevention cameras, on the other hand, are moveable, and have wide angle lenses, frequently capable of zooming.
The last widely discussed similar surveillance project was when another 'ad' company (actually just a front for MI5) was recording the signatures from people's mobile phones as they walked past the location in London. These are NOT secret projects- these are public facing exercises, like when Blair has schools in the UK fingerprint kids. They are conditioning exercises, preparing Britons for the next generation of the surveillance society- where no matter where you travel in Britain, computerised systems are making it clear that you, personally, are being recognised.
The inability to travel as a 'stranger' is recognised as massively increasing the stress response in many individuals, changing their fundamental mindset. In the 50s, when US corporate philosophers were on the rise, this idea was given the term "no place to hide". However, the paranoia about bloc corporate power in America proved unfounded (at least for the immediate decades that followed the 50s. Today, the most evil monsters imaginable (remember that Blair was directly responsible for the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, Syria, etc) are using their entrenched power-bases to re-engineer society in the most extreme fashion. Blair wants a World War, and yet so far has been frustrated by the natural survival instincts of the sheeple.
All of Blair's political and social efforts in the UK (and Blair, like Putin of Russia, will continue his iron grip of his homeland until the day he dies- and even then his loyalists will continue his projects) are designed to weaken the will of the people, and destroy their ability to oppose Earth shattering events like global war. When Blair shook the hand of Gaddafi, for instance, Blair began the countdown to the day he would have this man tortured and murdered. No nation has ever represented a greater danger to Humanity than present day Britain under Blair's de facto control. America simply provides the 'muscle' for Blair's planetary gangsterism.
UK supermarkets, like the large UK building companies, have always been owned by families directly connected to the major UK political parties. Almost every one of these companies is owned/run by a 'Lord' 'blah blah'. These corrupt business men usual sit on one or another of the Star Chambers that actually control Britain's social/political mid/long-term goals. Should you be surprised at this fact, when you remember that it is the supermarkets that FEED the sheeple?
Like the scandal of fingerprinting in school, this supermarket initiative will generate a minor backlash, and may well be cancelled, but that is all part of the plan. Wave after wave of attack like this hits the British people, until most simply give up caring. "In the future, we will just have to put up with this- its just in the nature of technology itself" is what Blair wants (with the help of mainstream media outlets) people telling themselves.
WORSE, Britain's abuse of technology JUSTIFIES vastly worse abuse of the same technology in Slashdot partner nations like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Every tinpot second/third world state with good relationships with the US government is saying "if Britain thinks it correct to spy on its people, we must follow"- and these dreadful places lack the 'checks and balances' still found in Britain and the USA.
Under Blair's stewardship (and Blair is the major partner of Obama, Putin and the Chinese leadership) the Earth is becoming a vastly more evil place. Humanity is doing nothing to fight back, taking an ever increasing fatalistic outlook, encouraged by nonsensical fear-mongering like 'climate change', a concept designed to make young people nihilistic and thus uncaring if the world plunges into war.
Except to ID "you" a face scan is not needed.
More interesting is an attire scan.
Zoom in on that watch.. if $15 Cassio classify
as a pennypincher. If prewashed blue jeans +$ if
old and faded two year old jeans -$...
Scan for passive inventory tags..
But faces... no
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
And really, what's the minimum wage stockperson going to do even if they see you? Do you think they get any of that sweet money the store gets from sucking the advertiser's cock? They're probably just as annoyed at being exposed to this noise NON STOP for their entire shift. And even if they aren't-- the store ain't paying them nearly enough to care.
You'd think so, but people who work for shitty organisations tend to "kick down". The company enforces idiotic policies on their boss, their boss mindlessly enforces the letter-of-the-law of the idiotic policies on staff, and staff mindlessly enforce them on you. You and lowest-level workers should find yourself naturally conspiring to undermine idiotic policies, but in the real world it rarely happens.
[Aside: Local department store has these in every isle. Mostly "produce demonstrations", ie, infomercials. They've upgraded them with hidden power supplies and no off-switch, but I can still turn down the volumes as I walk past. Obviously customers were turned them off, the store took the hint... and made them impossible to turn off. Sigh.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
No trial, either pay up, face harassment for the "debt", or go to court and pay to defend yourself.
"(Going) to court and pay(ing) to defend yourself" is going to trial.
I have a friend who worked with facial recognition stuff and at a college where they tested the tech, he kept getting the same face showing up at multiple places hundreds of times. Upon further investigation, he found out that t-shirts with Bob Marley's face on it were popular there.
If you want to be anonymous, wear a t-shirt with a popular person's face on it and a hat or hood. The software will pick the easy target instead of trying repeatedly to grab your face.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
In the UK some shops sue their customers if they suspect them of shoplifting. No trial, either pay up, face harassment for the "debt", or go to court and pay to defend yourself. They prefer it to reporting the crime to the police since they don't have to offer conclusive proof, and the police really don't give a fuck about people stealing from Tesco anyway.
Presumably once facial recognition is widely available the major chains will get together and blacklist people completely from most high streets (which only contain chain stores).
And hello deformation law suits as soon as one of these cameras mistakenly identifies Middle Class James Average as common crook Jack Chav.
This is why high street retailers or even tesco wont use them to bar customers. The scarier prospect is that they'll tie your face to your purchases so you'll be bombarded with ads as soon as you enter the store. Getting people to buy store brands (or preferred brands where the store makes maximum profit) is worth more to chain retailers than theft. A hell of a lot more.
Imagine if you will, you're walking into the toilet paper section, pick up a packet of your favourite "softex" brand toilet rolls and all of a sudden, the voice of a middle aged British woman erupts from the trolley:
"Now, now, wouldn't you prefer our brand of toilet paper?"
"I think you should put those back and select a packet of Tesco(TM) sandpaper toilet tissue."
"Oh dont just put those into the trolley and ignore me, didn't your mother ever teach you some manners."
"Such a naught person you are, you wouldn't like your mummy to find out about those lewd magazines you bought last week. You know, the one with that dreadful Katie Price on the cover, such crass material really."
"Yes, put those back, you'll be much happier with our brand"
"You're a good boy now aren't you"
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Tesco seems to like utilizing their camera systems...I worked for a company that offered a realtime POS to Camera analysis program and could detect shoplifting/dishonest employees, and we supported quite a few Tesco stores.
I would so love to code in a middle finger detector. I'm picturing the scene from The Fifth Element. "SMOKE YOUUUU!!!" *blam* cargo net.
The same chewing gum you previously bought from them.
Over a decade ago WalMart let slip an internal white paper about their ultimate dream for RFID. They want every product in their store to have an individually serialized RFID tag. When you walk though the door the tags on your clothes, which were purchased on your credit card, are correlated with your name. Since your pants are three years old the factory might be spending on higher quality fabric than necessary, but since you sometimes buy laundry soap for a high efficiency washing machine that might not be the case. A voice will tell you that your prescription will be ready by the time you get to the pharmacy counter. As you walk through the store the ads on the end caps will change to reflect your buying history. The televisions will change to a movie by a director that you've favored in the past but which you haven't purchased. As you walk past the magazine section you'll hear that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is available, since you bought that last year. Fortunately push-back from manufacturers has delayed the advent of that marketing Eden.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I know this is a complicated solution but....don't shop at Tesco?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial