SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1, Troll) by Arik on Thursday July 30 2020, @09:57AM
One of the most problematic aspects is the constant racialisation. People should be fed up with police committing crimes; regardless of the color of the victims. The reality is that criminal police target those they do not believe will be able to retaliate effectively, and that means poor people. Poor people of all colors.
Those who insist on racialising the issue, those who insist that only lives of a certain color matter, are not being progressive; but regressive. It seems like it would be embarrassing to them; if they had any self-awareness. When Rose City and the Proudboys were rumbling, it was hilarious to count the colors on each side, because Rose City, presenting themselves as the champions of the oppressed black and brown people, were virtually all lilly-white peeking out from behind their masks. Their opponents were much more diverse.
These are primarily affluent white kids who have been brainwashed by neo-marxist professors at school and just do whatever they're told out of a sense of racialised original sin courtesy of those same professors. So "self-loathing white kids" seems fairly accurate.
That said, the actions of the feds here are reprehensible too. The ACLU got a restraining order and the feds are completely ignoring it. We'll see if the court will enforce its order soon.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?