As far back as the 1970s, CCTV cameras have decorated private businesses and public buildings — providing a means of deterring theft for property owners and keeping records of activity through omnipresent VCR and later digital cameras. At its inception, there was virtually no backlash or critique against the new technology’s surveillance potential, allowing for a smooth implementation over the years. Now, decades later, it has become ubiquitous. Shoppers accept its existence and, consciously or not, adjust their behavior around it. For almost all, it is not a problem, but a fact of life.
Why, then, was there such an uproar when a popular East Coast supermarket chain revealed they are not only surveilling their customers with CCTV — but using their cameras to collect shoppers’ biometric data?
Gothamist, the NYC-fixed blog, reported in January that Wegmans grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn had put up signs that read “biometric identifier information collected at this location,” including facial recognition, eye scans and voiceprints.
The story caught wind — multiple New York State legislators and an NYC assembly member wrote letters to Wegmans disapproving of the practice. Some even proposed laws to make it mandatory for the chain to disclose these new surveillance systems in their areas outside of the city.
The resulting P.R. crisis pressured the grocery chain into a response. Though the company assured the media that the sole purpose of the technology is to keep their “stores secure and safe,” it admitted that their “system collects facial recognition data” in order to “identify individuals who have been previously flagged for misconduct.” In other words, Wegmans is building privately owned profiles of its customers, and categorizing some of them as potential criminals.
The statement claimed that “[i]mages and video are retained only as long as necessary for security purposes and then disposed of,” likening the technology to 20th century localized CCTV recordings — i.e. contained securely in one place and easily destroyed. The following sentence, however, casts an eerie ambiguity on this data retainment time frame: “For security reasons, we do not disclose the exact retention period, but it aligns with industry standards.” Without an “exact retention period” codified, Wegmans’ publicly-issued policy effectively gives them carte blanche to store biometric data for as long as they please, so long as the company deems it “necessary for security purposes.”
PERCEPTION RESET 