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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: 4, Interesting) by shortscreen on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:58AM (3 children)
This is the part that makes no sense, at least on the surface. Most people are against police brutality. Most of the politicians and media pundits claim to support the protests. But if your cause already has widespread support, why do the protests need to continue? Who is preventing the local and state governments from doing their jobs and answering the people's demands, so everyone can go home?
Protests are disruptive, and it doesn't matter whether it's just a few infiltrators causing the real mayhem because the fact is, if there was no protest there wouldn't be anything to infiltrate. The longer this goes on, the more opinions will shift in the other direction, and we'll be back to square one with nothing accomplished.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:07AM (1 child)
There is no organization. No BLM leader to call things off. No mystical "antifa" leader urging these things to continue. If you ramp up the jackboot thug thing, you'll ramp up the resistance to it, which is exactly what Trump wants to do. Great "law and order" stuff. Let's send "troops" into Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and all those other "democrat" cities.
Because they've got a whole propaganda network, they don't even bother making up excuses about what they're doing. Trump explicitly says what he's doing: he's sending Federal forces into cities and states, against the will of the Governors and Mayors (making it illegal, and certainly against the ideals about "federalism" that the R's used to say they held so dear), and he's explicitly said he's only sending them to cities run by democrats. Fox News doesn't say anything about the reasons (and the Trump administration don't have any coherent reasons for them, because there isn't lot of protests going on in some of those cities so they have to find SOME excuse to send them in), they generate conflict then get lots of good close-shot footage (wide angle would only show the it isn't widespread) to claim that the America-hating anarchist socialist democrats are trying to burn down the country and only Mr. Law and Order can fix things.
And if they can't do a good enough job to instigate good footage, they've always got the right wing folk dressed in BLM shirts to get it going.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:27AM
That's exactly why I'm saying that the opposition should pass police reforms, adjust budgets, and encourage the whole thing to wind down. Otherwise it looks like protestors are just fodder for Trump's pandering to his base, and outrage juice for the Dem base. Another bipartisan cock fight, where Americans get to be the cocks.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Booga1 on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:34AM
The very same people that the protests are about are the same people literally cracking down on the protestors, that's why things keep escalating. However, the people holding back reform are the cops that don't want to change anything about how they do their jobs and the politicians who don't want to appear "soft on crime."
Short answer: police unions.
When it comes to The police unions and "fraternal orders" around the country are crying foul! They don't want their power reduced. They don't want to be held accountable for when they step out of line. They have contracts that forbid firing of officers until all misconduct investigations and their appeals are complete. That's why you see cops getting desk duty for even the most egregious and provable offenses.
The police unions that are resisting reforms are trotting out the same old excuses:
That's just s small sample of what police unions have as objections to reforms. Don't forget they also get to investigate most misconduct claims against their very own officers. On top of that, there are often special protections in their contracts that no other government employees(or suspects) receive. Cops are often given 48 hours after an incident to "calm and collect themselves" before they are interviewed. They are also sometimes allowed to see all evidence against them before they make a statement. The list goes on and on...