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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:07AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:07AM (#1028466)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:27AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:27AM (#1028515) Journal

    If you ramp up the jackboot thug thing, you'll ramp up the resistance to it, which is exactly what Trump wants to do.

    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.