Rite Aid is banned for five years from using artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition to try to curb shoplifting, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Tuesday. In a press release, the age…
This is one of those things where I don’t really agree with the law on.
Shoplifters come back again and again and many try to screw with checkout people with coupon scams or simply know where in the store to go to hide the things they want to steal.
Verkada (a company that supplies cameras and the software to use them) has this kind of functionality built-in. All it does is let you setup alerts for people who are persons of interest. It’s not perfect but anyone paying attention can tell that the person on camera being alerted is the same as the POI or not. It doesn’t eliminate the human interactions needed to actually prevent shoplifting, but it does let you know who to focus on when they come in.
Normal store employees don’t get access to things like camera systems. Security / loss prevention employees are typically the ones with access and who would see a notification and then watch for someone to put things in a purse or pocket and try to walk out of the store.
So all they’re saying is “do not scrutinize this known thief unless you yourself remember them” which is pretty absurd. If someone doesn’t steal there isn’t a problem, and if there is the footage will back up the innocence (or guilt!) I don’t even know how this became a case.
I think the problem is that the tech used here doesn’t work. This isn’t some high end A.I. company spending a fortune on advanced facial recognition. It’s just a shitty camera in a drug store that probably doesn’t get cleaned and falsely dings every other dark-skinned face.
I’d believe some facial recognition software works effectively. TSA’s Global Entry kiosks and things like that where it’s a controlled environment with good lighting and the vendor/customer are willing to spend money. I do not believe fucking Rite Aid is going with a high end product to catch whoever keeps stealing Starburst.
Ehh, fuck Verkada in the neck with a rusty screwdriver. Their cold-calling and borderline-harassing sales tactics earned them a permaban in my org’s email filtering and phone system.
Seems like the y’re taking issue not with the technology, but Rite-Aid’s implementation of it, particularly that they didn’t do any of the required dilligence to prove that the tech wouldn’t be harmful, or violate privacy, or would even be accurate.
Sadly, every rite aid I’ve been to in Los Angeles has a huge shoplifting problem. Not sure what the solution is but so far they hire multiple security guards and have many products behind locked counters.
Statistically not true. And even the retail industry lobbyists has started backtracking on the claims.
The only city that has seen an increase in shoplifting in the last ~4-5 years, as I have seen in actual data analysis, is NYC. Everywhere else has seen an overall trend downward.
These narratives are all about trying to make you sympathetic to stores, creating justifications to close poorly-performing locations without suffering PR consequences, and to get the public to invest in security for retail stores so that the stores can save some bottom-line cost. And just regular ol' conservative love of the penal system.
In the raw numbers, shrink in general is not a major issue for retail and shoplifting only makes up a relatively small percent of shrink. It's just a great story to point to and makes great viral videos.
The articles you linked don’t support your conclusions. Sure, retail corporations will obviously attempt to frame the narrative such that it is advantageous to them. But you’re acting as if the fact that corporations have (possibly) overstated their losses indicates that shoplifting is not an issue?
The stats I’m seeing
Shrink totaled $112.1 billion in losses in 2022, about 1.6 percent of companies’ sales, up from $93.9 billion the year before
External theft accounts for about 35% of that figure, consistently
So shoplifting is costing greater than 0.5% of total sales annually. That’s far from negligible, considering the razor thin margins that most retailers operate with.
Shoplifting reports in 24 major cities where police have consistently published years of data — including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco — were 16% higher during the first half of 2023 compared to 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis.
However, excluding New York City, the number of incidents among the remaining cities was 7% lower.
The rise in shoplifting in NYC has been so massive that it has overshadowed the mild decline in shoplifting in other cities.
Walgreens said organized shoplifting was the reason it closed five stores in San Francisco in 2021.
Perhaps one reason why shoplifting rates in some cities has declined is that many stores in bad areas have been closed in the past several years in order to reduce shoplifting. Imagine that: companies complain about increased shoplifting > companies close problematic locations > shoplifting decreases. Granted I have no evidence to prove this hypothesis, but it certainly seems plausible.
My intuition is that this strategy (closing stores) is less effective in NYC because of the subway system. Unlike most other US cities, mass transit and density enables criminals to access any and all neighborhoods in the city, so closing individual locations simply causes the thieves to target another location.
“The overall data doesn’t indicate a great shift in the average shoplifting event, but the brazen ransacking incidents, coordinated on social media and captured on video, clearly suggest that there is a sense of lawlessness afoot,” said Adam Gelb, the CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice.
Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times
I wonder how many times they shoplifted and got away with it, if they got caught 6,000 times in one year. There is a concept known as the dark figure of crime, which refers to the hidden figure of unreported crimes that is not captured by the official statistics. Whether the criminal got away with it cleanly, the victim didn’t want to go through the legal hassle, the cops didn’t feel like filling out a report, etc, crime statistics are inherently unreliable (with the exception of homicide)
By the end of 2022, the theft of items valued at less than $1,000 had increased 53 percent since 2019 at major commercial locations, according to a new analysis of police data by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Over the past five years, shoplifting complaints nearly doubled, peaking at nearly 64,000 last year, police data shows. Only about 34 percent resulted in arrests last year, compared with 60 percent in 2017.
A spokeswoman for Walgreens, Kris Lathan, said the company had created a “major crimes unit” to assist authorities with investigations.
IIRC, corporations aren’t known to waste money, so the expansion of internal security departments and shoplifting prevention strategies seems like pretty good evidence that the problem is real.
In conclusion, corporations suck and I hate them, but there is a fairly significant shoplifting problem in America right now.
I specifically called out the rise in NYC -- which was essentially the sole responsibility of a small number of people and may have already been taken care of based on LEO action that has already happened.
If one arsonist burns down 2 city blocks, it would be very weird to frame the narrative as "nationwide arson is on the rise". While it may be technically true, it's not the real story. The story should be that we need to catch that guy because his behavior is wildly deviant from the norm instead of trying to pretend norms have changed when they haven't.
They have proven they do not have any kind of proper standards for coming up with their numbers. The presumption should be they're pulled from the depths of their assholes until they allow independent audit, which they don't -- when asked, they say the data is proprietary.
corporations aren’t known to waste money, so the expansion of internal security departments and shoplifting prevention strategies seems like pretty good evidence that the problem is real.
Don't underestimate a large, hierarchical bureaucracy's ability to be ponderous and operate with bad assumptions. In the long view, they will get sorted out, but in the short term they can drive industries. My bet is 5-10 years from now this entire shoplifting panic will be something people laugh at the idea of. But in the meantime we'll have created permanent expansions to the penal and carceral system that hurt us all.
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