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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Could you be more specific? What could they possibly [Edit:] have recorded in a second other than male/female, Japanese/foreigner, or child/adult?

Facial recognition is a unique identifier but cashiers have access to almost nothing they can record... [Edit] What was it?

Edit: clarified that I am asking about the history here, what information was manually collected by cashiers as parent stated

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Demographics and sales data is a primary example of big data.

The tweeted advertisement system also looks like it's only recording demographics. Not individual personal IDs.

Sorry, I wanted you to expand on this: "cashiers recorded buyer demographics by hand".

Give me an example of what they used to record by hand. All I can think of is "male, adult". I am specifically interested in what else you say they used to record.

I wasn't asking about the present status quo, only your historical statement about cashiers recording by hand.

Oh, OK. I edited in a link to the buttons the cashiers used, in the original post.

Thank you! Obviously that is far less privacy violating than demographics could be.

Today advertisers that phone home (spyware) often lie and claim only aggregate data is produced - but this manual example really is the kind of data that is okay. It's far less detailed than something like facial recognition. Thanks for adding the link!

You could distinguish people who are married or are parents (with false negatives) by recording people who are at the till with their spouse or children. (Send out demographic-research cards once, to a few of the same stores you've collected this info from, to derive a normalization factor that will make such collected observations useful from then on.)

You could make a note of a person's seeming affect—positive/negative/neutral emotion.

I'm asking historically what was actually done, not what could be done. (For, "what could be done" you could ask if the cashier had seen this person before? Are they a regular shopper here, as far as the cashier notices?) I am asking what information cashiers in Japan actually in fact recorded by hand. What did these cards look like for each customer. Etc.

Generally what has been "accepted" as done is age and male/female. I'm sure some places have done more but that's all I've heard of (lived in Japan for about 6 years now).

Image of actual buttons used added to the original post.

Keep in mind this has to be done while doing usual cashier things, so not much attention can be taken up by it.

Thanks!

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