Emerging Facial Recognition Technology Identifies Unusually Amiable Suspects Set to Infiltrate Local Retail Spaces
A novel form of surveillance might soon be available in shops close by—a facial recognition system engineered to spot irregular interactions between store employees and customers, notably recognized as "sweethearting."
Approximately a month ago, Corsight AI, based in Israel, debuted this service to their international clients, aiming to curb what the retail sector calls "sweethearting," or instances of shop workers offering discounts or free items to individuals they know.
Conventional facial recognition systems, largely popular in the retail sector due to companies like Corsight, primarily highlight individuals entering stores who are enlisted in shoplifting blacklists. The new sweethearting detection system takes this monitoring a step further, monitoring how each customer interacts individually with various employees over an extended period.
Corsight's CEO, Shai Toren, explained to Gizmodo that the system monitors the distance between customers and employees as well as returns that consistently involve the same employee. Departures from expectations set off alarms for security personnel to manage as needed.
"In a typical store, when somebody goes and picks up a few groceries, they would usually choose any cashier nearby to scan their goods," Toren said. "When someone is planning a sweethearting theft, they will always go to the same cashier, most often a family member, which is an anomaly in the behavior compared to other customers. Our system is able to identify this anomaly and alert on that."
Retail workers' advocates argue that the system is predicated upon a mistaken belief that a customer's loyalty to a specific salesperson indicates wrongdoing.
"We have a lot of concerns about this type of technology given that a lot of our members work on commission so the idea is that you are building a book of business based on relationships with customers," Chelsea Connor, communications director for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), stated. "Whether or not they work on commission, [stores] push salespeople to develop those relationships because that's what brings people back to brick and mortar instead of buying online."
Corsight acknowledged that select clients have already started using the sweetheart detection system but declined to disclose their identities.
For the past few years, major retail chains have increasingly introduced facial recognition and algorithmic surveillance systems, justifying the increased surveillance by referring to industry group warnings of "rising" retail crime.
Coverage of Corsight's new detection system by industry publications claims that sweethearting is a burgeoning issue that contributes to retailers losing $100 billion annually due to theft. These assertions appear to be grounded in reports from the National Retail Federation, which was compelled last year to retract some of its claims regarding the scope of retail theft after an investigation by Retail Dive revealed the group's annual theft analysis was based on a misinterpretation of its own data.
Based on data from its latest security survey, covering 2022, the NRF states that insider theft, including sweethearting, accounted for 29% of inventory losses known as shrink. It claims that 3% of the retailers included in its data have fully implemented facial recognition systems, and another 40% are researching or in the process of implementing facial and feature recognition.
The expansion of algorithmic surveillance systems in workplaces has prompted federal regulators to caution employers about misusing tools that predict and compile dossiers of employee behavior. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission even prohibited the pharmacy chain Rite Aid from using facial recognition after it was discovered that the company's system had falsely flagged customers, particularly women and people of color, as shoplifters.
Caitlin Seeley George, managing director of the nonprofit Fight for the Future, which has requested retailers to pledge not to use facial recognition, stated that in addition to being worried about biases in these systems, customers should also be concerned that corporations are exaggerating fears about theft in order to justify installing surveillance systems that can be utilized to profile customer behavior for marketing purposes.
"The information retail associations are sharing is cherry-picked to make the case for using this technology that they may want to use for various reasons," she said. "It just opens the door for mission creep beyond what they're claiming to focus on."
Sweethearting detection is only the starting point for Corsight's efforts to monitor not only who is in a store but also how they're behaving, stated Dror Simsolo, the company's marketing director.
"This is a new form of identification," Simsolo said.
In the future, Corsight AI might expand their technology to monitor not only sweethearting but also how customers interact with employees, using artificial intelligence to identify anomalies. With advancements in tech and artificial-intelligence, such surveillance systems could eventually become commonplace in various retail establishments.
