Israel-based Corsight AI offers a service aimed at rooting out what the retail industry calls “sweethearting,”—instances of store employees give people they know 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 blacklists of shoplifters. The new sweethearting detection system takes the monitoring a step further by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over long periods of time.
Advocates for retail workers say the system is based on the misguided assumption that a customer showing loyalty to a particular salesperson is a sign of wrongdoing.
The Federal Trade Commission banned the pharmacy chain Rite Aid from using facial recognition after it found that the company’s system had falsely flagged customers, particularly women and people of color, as shoplifters.
The nonprofit Fight for the Future, which has asked retailers to pledge not to use facial recognition, said that in addition to being worried about biases in these systems customers should also be concerned that corporations are inflating fears about theft in order to justify installing surveillance systems that can be used to profile customer behavior for marketing purposes.
SOURCE : https://gizmodo.com/facial-recognition-that-tracks-suspicious-friendliness-is-coming-to-a-store-near-you-2000519190 By Todd Feathers, November 1, 2024
RELATED : Corsight AI and ISEG elevate security measures at Monterrey Hospitals in Mexico
