Just because they haven't announced it doesn't mean they're not using it.

Honestly, I would just assume every grocery store has security cameras doing facial recognition to cross-reference and catch repeat shoplifters.

All those security cameras are there for a reason.

The only way in which I can see this going is by Wegmans answering "please send a high-res copy of your face so we can add it to the list of faces for which we won't keep records", at which point I'm not sure who's the winner anymore.

Back in 2000 I was at Wegmans and was offended when the head security guard followed my freaky hippie friend around so after that I started to mess with him. Like I noticed he had a spot where he liked to stand and surveil people going in and out of the store and I would stand in his spot so he couldn't have it, or I would conspicuously follow him around the store.

I signed up for an enumerator job at the US Census and a bunch of us turned up at the workforce development office where we were administered something like an IQ test. I disagreed but I remembered someone saying "the questions are so hard!"

They called me up and offered me a supervisor position which I didn't take because it seemed like a tiny amount of extra money for a lot more trouble. I got called back maybe a week later with an offer of a regular position which I took.

I show up for work and my supervisor was... the head security guard from Wegmans! He turned out to be a pretty nice guy and liked working for him!

The job had plenty of other misadventures like the way we had a plan for counting homeless people that you thought would have worked but we actually found zero homeless people (funny I would see them everywhere if I wasn't wearing my enumerator badge) Or how a woman who was working with us figured out we could save many hours of work by buying $20 worth of stickers, something there was no budget for but we decided there was nothing wrong with her just billing another 2 hours. Or how the students at the black living center mostly didn't fill out their census forms but instead of pestering them to fill them out we got a printout of all the students from the bursar's office that didn't have race on it and sent it on to the processing center -- so blacks got undercounted.

https://www.youtube.com/@businessreform/videos

Israeli cyber security companies have long trained models capable of recognising anybody (mostly used at checkpoints to catch terrorists), even by lower resolution cameras and when the person tries camouflaging. Police in wales even openly admitted to using it to conduct mass surveillance "to find criminals".

If you've taken an international flight, your face has been scanned, and you will be recognised and spotted wherever you go and there's a camera.

The irony of being fingerprinted to read a blog about fingerprinting is apparently lost on Adafruit.

Katz v. United States is an interesting case if you're interested (tldr one thing the case implied is that if your actions are freely observable by others of the public there's no expectation of privacy).

personally I think the only option these days is to push for very short retention policies governed by law such that use of information is inadmissible in a criminal situation (e.g. say a 1 week retention, they can't go scrubbing footage from months back to convict, wouldn't be allowed during discovery), and making it harder or illegal to share with other non-government entities. stopping collection I think is a ship that's sailed imo. it's pretty unlikely public or private surveillance (for supermarket like stores) will ever be made illegal. in fact I can't think of a country where it is.

- as a side note, suggesting to switch to Whole Foods is hilarious. Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, and you can look for yourself all the tracking they do

https://www.reuters.com/legal/lawsuit-accuses-amazon-secretl...

You don’t need to opt out of being punched in the face when going out in public, why do you need to opt out of unwanted, unmandated tracking when going shopping for essential items?

Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.

There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS

In-person grocery store trips mean something else now for tens of millions of people, so store security to also has to change with that big of a shift in demographics.