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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Over the last year or so all supermarkets in the UK have installed biometric facial recognition cameras at checkout. It's not subtle either – it's literally a HD video camera in your face.

So I started covering the checkout cameras and covering my face in supermarkets, but everyone thinks I'm overreacting. I guess I don't really get it. Am I suppose to be fine with this? This isn't some passive CCTV system, it's literally a camera pointed at my face to identify me christ sake.

And this stuff happens to me a lot here... I often refuse to give email addresses and number phones, but I get treated as if I'm the one being obstructive. The only exception seems to be if I'm talking about Facebook or Google, then people suddenly seem to care about their privacy, but in the real world there's no regard for privacy at all.

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Oh, that's what those are! I thought it was just a crappy video feed to try and deter theft. Much like all they eye symbols on security camera warning signs. "As if they'd actually get some poor sod to sift through all the footage to prove that you didn't pay for a packet of crisps!"

I'm not sure it's 100% clear what they're being used for or what the plans for them are. What I know is that when I walk into my local ASDA I now appear on a screen with green box around my face like this: https://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/business/asda-denies-usin...

As you can see they're denying that this is used for customer identification, but who knows. It seems extremely suspicious to me that they'd go so far as to implement AI to identify individual faces, but then do nothing with it.

What I do know is that there is a company called X5 in Russia which has similar self checkout cameras and they do use this for identification. And recently ASDA and other Supermarkets have partnered with Yoti (a UK digital identity company) to use their checkout cameras for age verification, https://www.yoti.com/blog/yoti-digital-age-verification-tria...

Imo it's clear where this is heading regardless of what it's being used for exactly today. And it's possible they might already be using these cameras to identify previous problematic customers, but I might just be paranoid. I don't think anyone really knows what individual supermarkets are doing with them today and no one really seems to care either.

What do they look like?

Is it this system? It sounds horrific. https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/uk-supermarket-...

No, the parent poster is referring to cameras that are positioned at self-checkouts. Self-checkout is problematic because of theft, and so cameras are a great way to discourage theft, in the same way that (fake) cameras have been used for years. If people are being watched, they behave better.

I'm skeptical of the claim that they're engaging in facial recognition. I guess, at some point, it's possible, but right now, given the widespread use of the cameras across every supermarket, it seems very difficult to imagine that all of these supermarkets have implemented a facial recognition system at the same time. Rather, they've all realised, if you put a camera at a self checkout, it'll probably reduce theft. That's why the screen is there, because you can see yourself being recorded, if it was for facial recognition... why a screen at all?

Typically a self-checkout will have a camera if it does not use a scale, whereas cameras are less common at the self-checkouts that use a scale -- and so it's harder to steal. That's my experience anyway across a few different supermarkets in the UK.

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