>Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.

They can already track you through your phone and/or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?

idk why, but they do

Got a source on retailers actively doing this?

Its very well known that Target, Wallgreens use facial recognition for shoplifting.

Its harder to prove any specific stores are using any specific survailence product for marketing, but plenty of companies are offering it. Here' Samsung's take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230410052807/https://www.samsu...

That’s really interesting- thanks for the link!

I meant more for marketing - definitely used lots for loss prevention.

Word of mouth: retailers in China have been using face recognition technologies to identify key customers so that they can be greater by name when delivered their favorite drink upon entering the premises.

The trouble with "word of mouth" is that you can't tell whether something is actually real, or vaporware that some account executive dreamed up to close a deal.

I agree, which is why I qualified it. I was working at a retailer, building it's cloud systems at the time. It was told to me by a colleague who claimed to be told that by a peer from China at a conference.

I don’t know about the US but in the UK they did it ostensibly to catch shoplifters.

We have a major problem with “professional” thieves stealing because the big chains don’t want to pay cashiers anymore.

You see a screen with your face on it in places like Waitrose self service checkouts now. It’s their way of saying “we know who you are”.

Tracking cash purchases is just a side bonus for them.

Are you aware of cases where it is used for more that theft prevention/manual review of CCTV?

I'm not aware of any big retailers using facial data for targeting vouchers or anything similar.

Simple things like "did walk through the door with a child" would be pretty valuable data, yet as far as I know, nobody uses it.

Is there actual evidence of this, like anywhere?

Facial recognition on a small corpus of known faces (what everyone experiences on Facebook, their phones, etc) is an easy problem.

Walmart picking up a face walking into a store and matching it against 30 million possibilities is going to return so many false positive matches it’s going to be completely useless.

Facial recognition is illegal where I live, both for gov't and commercial uses. Several major cities in the US have banned it (e.g., San Francisco, Boston, etc.).