Its the start of dynamic pricing
The comic is great, but this is the single thing that will work. Unless we choose in large numbers to avoid stores with facial recognition, they will proceed with this. Someone has crunched some numbers somewhere and decided that ultimately we will put up with it. If enough decide not to (and it’d only require about a 10-15% drop in sales), they will decide the technology is not worth it.
Who’s goin to start the campaign?
I don’t even need a campaign. If my local Colesworth gets AI facial recognition, I’ll happily go to the next suburb. We’re spoiled in Perth - between Aldi and Spud Shed, I can pretty-much avoid Colesworth if I like. Spud Shed is a bit of a hike, but I’d do it if my choices were that or a complete lack of privacy - particularly on the kids. These stores already know too much about me with their loyalty cards, that’s a deal I make to save $10 every few weeks.
The AI stuff gives me nothing - and the kids can’t really give consent to be surveiled.
I’ve thought about wrapping a 5050 IR led rope light around my head to wash out the cameras.
So start making the penalty for data breaches executive fingers. It will really bring home the importance of getting it right.
Plus there are more than a few companies that will have to work out how to get signatures from people who have lost all of their digits within weeks of that rule being put in place.
As things stand you have together caught breaking privacy laws, then you have to be unlucky enough to get properly investigated, then you need to be even more unlucky to actually get fined, and truly monumentally unlucky enough to not be able to tie things up in court long enough for the consequences to hit faster than the golden parachute can open.
Fines are just a cost of doing business and there’s so many avenues for “accidentally” having data leak after all.
