this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Learning on the job (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (48 children)

Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don't use self-checkout despite it potentially saving a lot of time. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago (24 children)

I avoid self checkout for different reasons.

  1. I'm not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.

  2. I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (13 children)

Further:

  • Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you're packaging a week worth of purchases.
  • You still need an employee to come over and certify that you're over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there's usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
  • I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it's just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
  • They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
  • They're non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
  • They often don't take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it's just a number on a screen).
[–] _core@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.

If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.

You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you're not being tracked b/c you used cash.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.

Your "argument" is akin to a claim that people shouldn't worry about having a good lock on their door because it's always possible to break the door down with explosives.

"Don't be the low hanging fruit" is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.

But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.

[–] _core@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Clearly you're not in tech, shadow profiles are a thing and the ROI on tracking "people like you" is pretty high.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Clearly you never actually done Tech projects in large corporate environments if you think complex shit is implemented across all sites just because it can be done, rather than because the expected profits exceed the cost and the hassle.

Also you seem to be under the impression that the social media guys would just give searchable access to their store of pictures (or provide a search service) to those big companies for free, which is a hilariously naive take on how Tech businesses work.

Automated following customers in a store with overhead cameras for the purposes of studying how they move around and purchase things is only done for some stores and has entirely different requirements for camera positions, external dependencies (no cross-referencing with external data to ID anybody is needed) and acceptable error rates (the data is not for selling to others so the error rates can be higher), because they don't need to actually ID anybody to extract "human movement patterns" out of that data and it's fine if the system confuses two people once in a while because there is no external customer of that data getting pissed off when the same person is reported as making purchases in two places at the same time or other stupidly obvious false positives.

Meanwhile matching the list of items bought with payment information, both of which already get sent from the tellers to the backend systems (for purposes of inventory tracking and accounting), is easy peasy and has a very low error rate.

You're ridding a massive Dunning-Krugger there in thinking you're the expert.

[–] _core@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I never said they'd be tracked around the store. Matching items bought with who bought them using data taken at POS, including pictures of the face is what I said. AI and website scraping make putting a name to a face a low bar to get over. Or a company could use any of the plethora of OSINT tools to find who a customer is.

tools to find someone using a photo

[–] FelixCress@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked

You will be all right mate, you just need to wear a little tinfoil hat, that stops this kind of tracking.

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