“We could soon have security cameras in stores that identify people as they shop,”
Already deployed. Here's a report by a retailer who installed a face recognition system.[1] Names anonymized.
“We now know within seconds of a person walking in the store if they’ve previously been caught stealing from us. ... Suppose Johnny Johnson is caught shoplifting at a Store-Mart branch. He’s detained, photographed, and given a barring notice. Johnson’s photo is entered into Store-Mart’s database of known shoplifters, becoming an “enrollee” in the system. Three weeks later, Johnson walks into Store-Mart again. Within five seconds, the system has captured his image from the store security cameras, compared it against every photo enrolled in Store-Mart’s database, found a match, and sent an alert to the in-store loss prevention associate’s (LPA) smartphone. The LPA looks at his phone, and Johnson’s name, photo, and detention history with Store-Mart pops up. The LPA verifies that the photo in the alert actually matches the person who just walked in. Then the associate approaches and says, “Mr. Johnson, you’ve previously been given a barring notice from Store-Mart. You’re not allowed to be here. Please leave.” And Johnson walks back out. So, within a minute or so of walking in, a known shoplifter has left the store, empty-handed."
Coming next, the sharing model:
"A national shoplifter database similar to the Stores Mutual Association model is already in the works. This would mean that each additional retailer who adopts the security camera technology and starts sharing will incrementally increase the value of the system for all members."
What happens if nearly all retail stores had this and you got caught shoplifting. Are you no longer allowed to shop in public? Is thee a time limit, say 1 year, after which they should let you shop again?
> Is thee a time limit, say 1 year, after which they should let you shop again?
This implies a functioning government, and regulations.
Excluding is a decision made by each retailer individually, and the vast majority will not even have a policy for removing people from the list.
You could dynamically raise retail prices based on whether someone has bad credit, or is on one or more bad customers lists. Shouldn't the shoplifter be expected to pay extra for the risk that retailers willing to sell to them bear? Or you could just open stores that don't exclude with high prices and terrible quality products.
Yes, that's why Marks & Spencer in the UK operate the scheme and share the system with other major retailers in the UK. They are able to use the UK prevention and detection of crime exception to avoid data protection laws.
I presume that's who Store-Mart are, but there are others doing similar stuff.
Of course. See this marketing video from FaceFirst, which powered the retail application mentioned above.[1] They offer cloud-based facial recognition as a service. "FaceFirst maintains a massive, centrally managed database and server farm at our headquarters."
Since much of their input comes from video, they get lots of pictures of each individual and combine them. This improves accuracy. They use the Cognitec face matching algorithm.
WalMart tried FaceFirst in 2015, and gave up on it.[2] "We were looking for a concrete business rationale ... It didn’t have the ROI."
Facebook has what they call "shadow profiles" that still track you even if you've never signed up (or deleted your account). Not using Facebook doesn't mean they don't have information on you.
Many sites do this. They encourage users to give full access to their phone's contact list, and store all the data they get from it, then start building a network of "people who know this email address/phone number", ostensibly so that when they finally convince someone to sign up they have a ready-made network of recommended "people you may already know".
We can already fingerprint digital devices and make pretty good guesses based on purchases and geofencing (leaving the area) whose fingerprint goes to which digital device (especially over repeated visits). I haven't heard of a company that offers this at scale or to cross-reference the information, but I can't imagine it'll take long. It's just a matter of some elbow grease for engineering and the right sales team.
You know people who use Facebook. They upload pictures that, more likely than not, include your face. Facebook knows your face even if it doesn't know your name (which people will often readily supply even if you don't have an account, so don't be so sure that they don't know your name too).
You don't want to be "that guy" constantly demanding that your friends pull down any picture that you show up in, a request your friends will probably ignore anyway, and which will greatly diminish your personal likability.
The government has your name, face, address, and other personal information stored away safely in DMV and passport databases, among several others, and this information is surely being used in similar ways behind the scenes. Facebook neatly bundles all of its data and submits it to the NSA via PRISM every day, granting the government full access to both datasets, although to be frank, just Facebook's dataset is going to be good enough to track someone down, even if a little more work is necessary to dig up the exact details like address.
An interested party with such access could almost surely run a program and find the last people you were photographed with, which will almost definitely make it easy to find you personally. Combine this with smart surveillance systems and any time you enter a public place, sans cell phone or any other trackers, your personal location can be recorded.
I don't really think there's any way around it and I am in fact surprised that people haven't already made a public "search by face" engine. Correlate this data with Facebook or some other all-seeing collections and the technology to dynamically identify every individual that enters a building via surveillance footage is already there. The only thing holding it back now is a) political correctness and b) the practical difficulty of extracting all of this data at a large scale into a format that can be easily cross-referenced. Both of these are permeable and temporary restrictions, and access to the data is already a non-issue for some actors.
Expect to see such systems developed and sold in the next several years. Laws may make such software illegal, which will limit distribution to laypeople, but ultimately it will still be out there for interested parties to acquire.
The age of unscannables and cyberpunks is upon us. The only way to retain privacy will be to wear your hair in interesting ways. [0]
Discreetly snap someone's photo and there's an excellent chance that face recognition will fond their social media profile. Now you have their name and potentially a lot more (age, school, hometown, etc).
All it takes is enough centralization and a culture of sharing a lot online and you're loving in the future!
> You don't want to be "that guy" constantly demanding that your friends pull down any picture that you show up in, a request your friends will probably ignore anyway, and which will greatly diminish your personal likability.
Mostly because it doesn't work. I've always been that guy, and people still constantly take your picture. There's a lot of money in convincing people that taking and sharing publicly pictures of oneself and everything that one comes into contact with is unbelievably fulfilling.
> I don't really think there's any way around it and I am in fact surprised that people haven't already made a public "search by face" engine. Correlate this data with Facebook or some other all-seeing collections and the technology to dynamically identify every individual that enters a building via surveillance footage is already there. The only thing holding it back now is a) political correctness and b) the practical difficulty of extracting all of this data at a large scale into a format that can be easily cross-referenced. Both of these are permeable and temporary restrictions, and access to the data is already a non-issue for some actors.
> You don't want to be "that guy" constantly demanding that your friends pull down any picture that you show up in, a request your friends will probably ignore anyway, and which will greatly diminish your personal likability.
I'm not extreme enough to go there - what I meant more is that I don't use it because I don't want to support a company that violates peoples' privacy so much. I really could care less if they can recognize me in particular.
I stopped using Facebook 5 years ago because I noticed using it made me unhappy. I continue to not go back because of privacy concerns like this.