Facial Recognition That Tracks Questionable Friendships is Coming to a Store Near You

A whole new way to get spied on could be coming to a store near you; A facial recognition system designed to detect when retail employees are having abnormal interactions with customers.

About a month ago, Israel-based Corsight AI began offering its global customers access to a new service that aims to eliminate what the retail industry calls “sweethearting,” in which store employees give discounts or free items to people they know.

Traditional facial recognition systems, which have become widespread in the retail industry thanks to companies such as Corsight, flag people entering stores as people on a designated blacklist of shoplifters. The new dating detection system takes tracking one step further by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over long periods of time.

Shai Toren, Corsight’s CEO, told Gizmodo that the system analyzes how close customers stand to different employees and whether returning customers consistently go to the same employee when they visit a store. Anomalies trigger alerts to store security personnel, who decide how to proceed.

“If you walk into a store and buy a few groceries, you’ll usually pick one of the cashiers around and scan your items,” he said. “When someone plans to commit a theft on their lover, they always go to the same cashier, who is often their relative, and this is a behavioral anomaly compared to other customers. “Our system can detect this anomaly and alert about it.”

Advocates for retail workers say the system is based on the false assumption that a customer’s loyalty to a particular salesperson is a sign of wrongdoing.

“We have a lot of concerns about this type of technology, given that many of our members work on commission, so we came up with the idea of ​​building a book of business based on relationships with customers,” said Retail Communications Director Chelsea Connor. , Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “Whether they work on commission or not, (stores) are pushing their salespeople to develop those relationships because that’s what brings people back to brick-and-mortar instead of buying online.”

Corsight says some of its customers already use the dating detection system but refuse to reveal their identities.

Over the past few years, major retail chains have increasingly deployed facial recognition and other algorithmic surveillance systems, justifying the increased surveillance, with the industry group warning: “rising” retail crime.

Early coverage of Corsight’s new detection system industry publicationsclaims that dating is a growing challenge that causes retailers to lose $100 billion a year to theft. These claims appear to be based on: reports From the National Retail Federation, which struggled last year draw back Some of the claims regarding the extent of retail theft after a while investigation Research by Retail Dive found that the group’s annual theft analysis was based on a misinterpretation of its own data.

NRF says based on data from its latest security study covering 2022, insider theft, including dating, accounts for 29 percent of inventory losses, known as shrinkage. It said 3 percent of retailers included in its data have fully implemented facial recognition systems, and another 40 percent are researching or in the process of implementing facial and feature recognition.

The proliferation of algorithmic surveillance systems in workplaces has prompted federal regulators to take action. warn employers about the misuse of tools that predict employee behavior and create dossiers. Last year the Federal Trade Commission banned Drugstore chain Rite Aid has stopped using facial recognition after finding that the company’s system was wrongly flagging customers, especially women and people of color, as shoplifters.

Caitlin Seeley George, executive director of the retailer nonprofit Fight for the Future. pledge Not only should customers worry about bias in these systems by not using facial recognition, they should also worry that companies are heightening fears about theft to justify installing surveillance systems that could be used to profile customer behavior for marketing purposes, he said.

“The information shared by retail associations has been carefully selected to make the case for the use of this technology, which they may want to use for a variety of reasons,” he said. “This just opens the door to mission that goes beyond what they claim to focus on.”

“Detecting cuteness is just the beginning of Corsight’s work to track not only who is in the store, but also how they behave,” said Dror Simsolo, the company’s marketing manager.

“It’s a different flavor of identification,” he said.