Facial recognition tracking suspicious friendship is coming to a store near you

A new way to be surveilled could be to come to a nearby store — a facial recognition system designed to detect when retail workers are having abnormal interactions with customers.

About a month ago, Israel-based Corsight AI began offering its global customers access to a new service designed to eliminate what the retail industry calls “sweethearting”—instances in which store employees offer people on who know their discounts or free items.

Traditional facial recognition systems, which have proliferated in the retail industry thanks to companies like Corsight, flag people entering stores who are on designated shoplifter blacklists. The new love detection system takes monitoring a step further by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over long periods of time.

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

“If you go into a store and pick up some groceries, you’d usually pick any of the cashiers around and go scan your goods,” he said. “When someone is planning a robbery in love, they will always go to the same cashier, who is most of the time a relative of theirs, and this is a behavioral anomaly compared to other customers. Our system is able to identify this anomaly and alert about it.”

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 misconduct.

“We have a lot of concerns about this type of technology because a lot of our members work on commission, so the idea is that you’re building a book of business based on customer relationships,” said Chelsea Connor, director of communications for Retail. , the Wholesale Trade and Department Stores Union (RWDSU). “Whether they work on commission or not, (stores) push sales people to develop those relationships because that brings people back to brick and mortar instead of shopping online.”

Corsight says some of its customers already use the girlfriend detection system, but declined to identify them.

Over the past few years, major retailers have increasingly installed facial recognition and other algorithmic surveillance systems, justifying the increased surveillance with warnings from industry groups about “rising” retail crime.

Early coverage of the new Corsight detection system in industry publicationsclaims that love is a growing challenge that contributes to the $100 billion lost to retailers annually due to theft. Those claims seem to be based on rEPORTS from the National Retail Federation, which was obliged last year to withdraw some of the claims he made about the scope of retail theft after o investigate de Retail Dive found that the group’s annual theft analysis was based on a misinterpretation of its own data.

Based on data from its most recent security study, which covers 2022, the NRF says insider theft, including piracy, accounted for 29 percent of stock losses known as shrinkage. It said 3 percent of retailers in its data have fully implemented facial recognition systems, and another 40 percent are researching or in the process of implementing facial recognition and features.

The proliferation of algorithmic surveillance systems in the workplace has prompted federal regulators to do just that warn employers about the misuse of tools that predict and create profiles of employee behavior. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission forbidden drugstore chain Rite Aid used facial recognition after finding that the company’s system falsely flagged customers, particularly women and people of color, as shoplifters.

Caitlin Seeley George, CEO of the nonprofit Fight for the Future, who called on retailers to pledge to not use facial recognition, said that in addition to being concerned about biases in these systems, customers should also be concerned that corporations are inflating fears of theft to justify installing surveillance systems that can be used to profile customer behavior for marketing purposes.

“The information that retail associations share is chosen to justify the use of this technology that they may want to use for a number of reasons,” she said. “It just opens the door for missions beyond what they claim to be focused on.”

Girlfriend detection is just the beginning of Corsight’s work monitoring not only who’s in a store, but how they’re behaving, said Dror Simsolo, the company’s chief marketing officer.

“This is another identifying flavor,” he said.