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Rite Aid Deployed Facial Recognition Systems in Hundreds of U.S. Stores

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:49PM   
from the There-are-two-eyes-in-"Rite-Aid" dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Location, location, location (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @09:06PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @09:06PM (#1028300)

  While I'm not familiar with the company I have to ask if they available everywhere or are they mainly available in said described neighborhoods? If so then perhaps it's not so strange that they are there and it doesn't have anything to do with racism or whatnot. Do they have any upscale boutiques in affluent neighborhoods to where they sell their drugs (yes I know, not that kind of drugstore) where they didn't use the system? If they don't then this sort of falls flat on the outrage part, even if it checks all the current big brother tags.

  It's kind of interesting tho if they had rolled this out more then a year ago and it took this long for someone to snitch to the media, after all many stores, many people doing the installing, even more normal employees, hard to keep the conspiracy secret the more conspirators there are involved.

  There used to be a RiteAid in my neighborhood. It was mostly okay, except there was always a long line to check out, except in the middle of the night (it was open 24/7), so I'd generally go then.

  They closed a few years ago and were replaced by a CVS whose prices are *much* higher and the selection much smaller. Not an improvement.

  I don't know about other RiteAid locations, but the median home price is USD$1,085,142 [zillow.com] in my neighborhood. Then again, There's public/subsidized housing less than two blocks from the old RiteAid location.

  By the way, RiteAid is *huge* (Fortune 100) company with almost 2,500 stores [wikipedia.org]:

  Rite Aid Corporation is a drugstore chain in the United States. The company ranked No. 94 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.[4] It is headquartered in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg.[5][6] Rite Aid is the largest drugstore chain on the East Coast and the third largest in the U.S.

  Parent