Hacker News Reader

Comment by ungreased0675 | Hacker News Reader

The people building this stuff need to think through what they’re doing.

Imagine this is wildly successful and most stores adopt it. Does someone with shoplifting on their record get banned from buying groceries everywhere? What if the government provides a list of undesirables to exclude from society?

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Please don’t create the Torment Nexus.

View on HN

Is the alternative to then let goods be stolen, have shops lock products away and consume police resources trying to track people down that they have average footage of?

We can think worst case scenario for everything and not doing anything, or be realistic.

Without condoning this, I think it’s important to be very clear about what this is: it’s an automation improvement to a decades-old existing system. Most retail stores already keep (and share!) photos of suspected shoplifters, with the work being done by printing screenshots from security camera footage. The goal is to discourage them from shoplifting by constantly having an employee nearby, and to only kick them out if they’re caught in the act. Personally, I don’t think increased surveillance is a worthwhile use of resources, and I think it could lead to abuses like you’ve described, but from the POV of the people building this, they’re taking an existing labor-intensive task and making it easier. From their perspective, it’s easy to argue that this won’t lead to blanket bans and lists of undesirables because those could already exist, but they don't.

I find it odd, that things are implemented in a continual surveillance state kind of way. It should be that an alarm goes off when people approach or pass the store exits with unpaid for items and then their face pic is taken too, while hopefully being caught by store security.

It should not be necessary to do facial recognition on everyone, all the time, and who have done nothing wrong. Then use their facial data however the store and state feels like it, without consent and as part of databases for publicly unknown purposes.

Right now shoplifters have the advantage. That has many negative effects (stores closing, merchandise being locked up). It's not the Torment Nexus to make life more difficult for them.

Would you feel the same if you became one of the false positives.

Yes, I would not feel that it was the Torment Nexus if I was mistakenly identified as a shoplifter. It would be a hassle though. I'm willing to rely on the business incentive to reduce false positives to avoid offending customers.

If you are not a hardcore prison abolitionist you are comfortable with the idea of a government provided list of undesirables to exclude from society. If you are a hardcore prison abolitionist, and you're not insane, then you probably have some other libertarian/anarchist idea for how to create a list of undesirables to exclude from society that, in practice, amounts to recreating a government in a roundabout way.

I, for one, don’t care if thieves are excluded from stores. They can buy and get curbside delivery in the parking lot, and if that is a little more expensive than shopping for yourself, well, you’ve made everyone else’s groceries just that little bit more expensive for years while getting them for yourself for free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com