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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Profiling sucks.

In this case though, I'd say you're simply trading one injustice for another.

You go from the ephemeral experience of having a few underpaid lackeys mistrust you, to having an eternal database of everything you buy owned by a third party.

Then again, it's getting pretty ridiculous everywhere. The local supermarkets around me - they've gradually stripped real checkout operators away and replaced them with self service booths that each have LCD's beaming a picture of my own face at myself whilst I shop, with a scary "you're being watched!" banner across the bottom.

It really bothers me that everyday 'essential' things seem to be full of pain points like this for no discernible reason. We have private companies launching rockets, supercomputers in our pockets, and so on and so forth, and yet the "human experience" seems to be constantly degrading. What can we do about this?

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> an eternal database of everything you buy owned by a third party.

Lots of people pay by credit card, or use store cards to get discounts. I wonder if it might be worth volunteering that information without any convenience/price reward if it means the shop might somehow act to serve me better as a customer.

I also think self-checkouts are net less degrading than human checkouts. Bag your own groceries. Be trusted enough to say whether those were organic tomatoes and pay the extra few cents. Lower prices and shorter lines are great too.

> I wonder if it might be worth volunteering that information without any convenience/price reward if it means the shop might somehow act to serve me better as a customer.

If they'd serve you better that automatically means they'd serve everyone else worse who didn't want to give up that information.

You'll love the Social Credit System in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

This is not a world I want to live in.

> they'd serve everyone else worse

That doesn't follow. It could be positive-sum.

Just from the checkout (without customer identifiers) they can find correlations. "People who buy salsa tend to buy corn chips. Let's put them near each other in the store."

With identifiers they might be able to do more things of that sort. "A few customers shop in two different locations -- over here for fresh produce, but over there for baked goods. Wonder why?"

> You'll love the Social Credit System in China

Be civil.

I want to know what the bibles get stocked next to...

next to guns, ammo, gas masks, canned food, toilet paper ...

Not only that but you also raise the requirements for grocery / department store shopping. In principle all you need to shop at most stores is cash and being able to get to the physical location of the store. With Amazon Go you need a smartphone with a data plan, an amazon account, and a bank account. Even in America not everyone has all of those, or even any one of those. I personally spent a few years as an adult without a bank account. These requirements amount to a "you must be this rich to use this store" sign, and there are easily tens of millions of Americans who are not rich enough to use these stores even if they do have the money to buy some of the goods inside.

While fiscal underserving remains a problem there are $20 burner phones which are smartphones. Gift cards and prepaids can be used as well by those without. An extra obstacle certainly but one that can be overcome surprisingly easily.

How do you purchase the cheap smart phone and activate the gift card when you can't get in the shop in the first place?

Dude, Amazon owns Whole Foods. The "you have to have money to use this store" market already exists.

There is a difference between "you have to have money to use this store" to "you have to have money plus these bells and whistles to use this store".

You can be poor and use whole foods once in a while. You can use cash at whole foods. You don't need a modern cell phone, a data plan, and a credit card on file to use whole foods. I'm pretty sure you can use food stamps at whole foods. You don't need a proper bank account. And so on.

Weirdly, you don't really need these things to shop at amazon either. All you need is a pre-paid card, a gift card, and a bit of internet access (at the library). You an use someone else's address to ship things to if necessary.

A homeless person could walk into Whole Foods and buy something with cash. And there are many items at Whole Foods which are not outrageously expensive. There's a very distinct difference between a store which has expensive items and a store which has a minimum level of affluence to even use. A poor person could conceivably "splurge" on an expensive item at an expensive store, but that is only possible if they have access.

The world is already like that, has been and always will be. Different stores, hotels, bars, and restaurants have different price points depending on the target clientele. People in society want that price discrimination, from the school districts they buy their houses in, to the restaurants they eat at, to the places they go for vacation.

The newness comes from how good we can get at stratifying society, based on databases that never forget and precise calculations about worth and future potential. Also, with a widening income/wealth gap and trend towards urban living, you need something more than physical space to separate the classes.

This looks like a strawman. I didn't see anyone claim that all shopping experiences everywhere should be replaced with this. Amazon Go definitely requires you to have a bunch of things many people don't have access to, and can amount to a "you must be rich to use this store" sign.

But that doesn't change any of what the article described.

Profiling is extremely useful for business and extremely harmful for long-term societies, as soon as we accept this fact and decide a long-term society is what we want, then we can agree short-term profits can go fuck themselves as far as ethical behavior goes and decide that if you can't be ethical you may as well go bankrupt and agree that's totally Ok regardless of how many jobs are lost -one billion or a couple-

Why do you assume that the experience is ephemeral? It sounds like you're trying to downplay the experience of black people being profiled in stores.

I think that for people that have to deal with this kind of discrimination day in day out for most of their lives, regardless of how much you believe they're exaggerating, trading that for Amazon's database of their purchases is a sweet deal.

Please don't do this.

I'm legitimately confused. What should I not do?

> It sounds like you're trying to downplay the experience of black people being profiled in stores.

The very first two words of my comment run completely counter to that.

The rest of your comment goes even further into strawman territory. I don't believe any exaggeration is occuring at all. Profiling is real and sucks.

edit: To clarify, I agree with the basic sentiment that the trade might be worth it for some! It is for the author...

That point would have been just as valid have without putting words in my mouth.

Thanks for explaining.

My point about exaggeration was about describing racial profiling and corporate data collection as comparable injustices.

I think if you'd tell a victim of lifelong racial profiling that they're really just trading one injustice for another because now Amazon has a database of what you buy, they'd laugh. I'd say the two injustices are not even in the same league.

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