Facial Recognition That Follows Suspicious Friends Is Coming to a Store Near You

A brand new form of surveillance may be coming to a store near you—a facial recognition system designed to detect when sales staff are acting strangely with customers.

About a month ago, Israel-based Corsight AI began offering its global customers access to a new service aimed at eliminating what the retail industry calls “cheating,” —the practice of store employees offering discounts or freebies to people they know.

Traditional facial recognition systems, which have become popular in the retail industry thanks to companies like Corsight, flag people entering stores who are on a designated list of shoplifters. The new partner acquisition system takes proactive monitoring by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over a long period of time.

Shai Toren, CEO of Corsight, told Gizmodo that the system analyzes how close customers are to different employees and whether returning customers go to the same employee when they visit a store. The anomaly creates alerts for security personnel, who decide how to proceed.

“When you go into a store to pick up a few groceries, you usually choose the cashiers who are there and check your goods,” he said. “If a person plans to steal money, he will always go to one cashier, most of the time it is his relative, which is a strange behavior compared to other customers. Our system is able to identify these anomalies and warn about them. “

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

“We have a lot of concerns about this type of technology as many of our members work in the commission so the idea is that you build a book of business based on relationships with customers,” said Chelsea Connor, director of communications at Retail. , Wholesale, and Door Store Union (RWDSU). “Whether they work on commission or not, [stores] push sales people to develop those relationships because that’s what brings people back to brick and mortar instead of online shopping.”

Corsight says that some of its customers are already using the program to identify lovers but have refused to identify them.

In the past few years, major retail chains have increasingly installed facial recognition and other algorithmic surveillance systems, signaling increased vigilance by targeting industry group warnings of “growing” retail crime.

An early presentation of Corsight’s new acquisition program in an industry publication, says that piracy is a growing challenge that contributes to retailers losing $100 billion to theft every year. Those allegations appear to be based on reports from the National Retail Federation, which was forced last year to retract some of its claims about increased shoplifting after an investigation by Retail Dive found that the group’s annual shoplifting survey was based on research. misinterpretation of its data.

Based on data from its latest security survey, which covers 2022, the NRF says that insider theft, including theft, accounted for 29 percent of property losses known as shrinkage. It said 3 percent of retailers included in its data have fully implemented facial recognition systems and another 40 percent were researching or in the process of implementing facial and feature recognition.

The spread of algorithmic surveillance systems in the workplace has prompted the organization’s regulators to warn employers against the misuse of predictive tools and create employee behavior documents. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission banned pharmacy chain Rite Aid from using facial recognition after finding that the company’s system falsely flagged customers, especially women and people of color, as shoplifters.

Caitlin Seeley George, executive director of the non-profit organization Fight for the Future, which asked retailers to commit to not using facial recognition, said that in addition to being concerned about fairness in these systems, customers should also be concerned that companies are fueling the fear of theft. to justify the installation of surveillance systems that may be used to profile customer behavior for marketing purposes.

“Organizations that sell shared information are choosing to use this technology and they may want to use it for a variety of reasons,” he said. “It just opens the door to missions that go beyond what they say they are focused on.”

Acquiring Sweethearting is the beginning of Corsight’s mission to monitor not only who is in the store, but how they behave, said Dror Simsolo, the company’s director of marketing.

“This is a different flavor of identification,” he said.