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from the There-are-two-eyes-in-"Rite-Aid" dept.
Reuters: Rite Aid monitored customers using facial recognition cameras
Over about eight years, the American drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp quietly added facial recognition systems to 200 stores across the United States, in one of the largest rollouts of such technology among retailers in the country, a Reuters investigation found.
In the hearts of New York and metro Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods, according to a Reuters analysis. And for more than a year, the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government.
In telephone and email exchanges with Reuters since February, Rite Aid confirmed the existence and breadth of its facial recognition program. The retailer defended the technology's use, saying it had nothing to do with race and was intended to deter theft and protect staff and customers from violence. Reuters found no evidence that Rite Aid's data was sent to China.
Last week, however, after Reuters sent its findings to the retailer, Rite Aid said it had quit using its facial recognition software. It later said all the cameras had been turned off.
It's a very long article:
Reuters pieced together how the company's initiative evolved, how the software has been used and how a recent vendor was linked to China, drawing on thousands of pages of internal documents from Rite Aid and its suppliers, as well as direct observations during store visits by Reuters journalists and interviews with more than 40 people familiar with the systems' deployment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @08:52PM (1 child)
Race is a really strong proxy for poverty.
There is significant police harassment of the poor in rich neighborhoods, particularly evident in rich coastal enclaves in Florida - along the water mostly.
The surveillance state doesn't care as much about the kink of your hair as it does how you are impacting their bottom line, serving the poor is rarely as profitable as serving the rich.
Now, if you're going to a NASCAR event in Talladega, them good ol' boys ain't so sophisticated as to be able to tell rich from poor, but they sure can spot a spade in the crowd. Not much has been done in those parts of the country to really effectively erase racism. But, TFA is talking about LA and New York, not Birmingham and Shreveport. In the big coastal cities of the US, money talks louder than race - even if race and poverty have a strong correlation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @09:08PM
Really? Like West Virginia?