> Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England[, "Southern Co-operative", ]are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group[, Big Brother Watch]
> The facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers
> "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse", Southern Co-operative said. // It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores [15%..20%] where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender [...] «The purpose of our limited and targeted use of facial recognition is to identify when a known offender enters one of our stores ... This gives our colleagues time to decide on any action they need to take, for example, asking them to politely leave the premises or escalating the incident if this is a breach of an injunction or a banning order»
Other articles on the case have been submitted in the past hours, from the BBC and The Guardian:
One wonders what kind of special «violence and abuse» can be so frequent in southern England, and if it at a level and frequency which justifies such measures, there is an out of hand situation that should be assessed explicitly. It does not seem that the debate in the UK - and I listened many hours of that in the past few days - recognizes the problem.
> The facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers
> "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse", Southern Co-operative said. // It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores [15%..20%] where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender [...] «The purpose of our limited and targeted use of facial recognition is to identify when a known offender enters one of our stores ... This gives our colleagues time to decide on any action they need to take, for example, asking them to politely leave the premises or escalating the incident if this is a breach of an injunction or a banning order»
Other articles on the case have been submitted in the past hours, from the BBC and The Guardian:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32236849
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32240094
One wonders what kind of special «violence and abuse» can be so frequent in southern England, and if it at a level and frequency which justifies such measures, there is an out of hand situation that should be assessed explicitly. It does not seem that the debate in the UK - and I listened many hours of that in the past few days - recognizes the problem.