this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Further:
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.
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.
Clearly you're not in tech, shadow profiles are a thing and the ROI on tracking "people like you" is pretty high.
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.
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
You're still thinking it at a the level of "can", rather than the level of "is it worth it".
"Possible" isn't the same as "profitable" - the whole point of stores doing it would be to sell that data to entities such as Health Insurers, and that data would be sold at pennies (and I don't mean pennie-per-entry, I mean pennies-per-thousands), so it has to be possible to do it extremely cheaply, which it is if you already have the necessary information in digital form in a database (user id from the payment card and the list of items purchased along with date, time and location of purchase), but it's not if you have to do reverse image search in bulk, not least because the providers out there won't just allow other businesses to do it for free to make money out of it - they'll demand a cut for doing the computationally hardest part of the process (or, if the supermarkets want to do it themselves, for access to their store of pictures).
Also, the quality of results from reverse image search is pretty bad in terms of actually finding and correctly identifying a person from a picture - it often just outright fails or gives false positives, which means data obtained that way is a lot more polluted with false results than just finding the person ID via the card used for payment, which is near perfect (not quite perfect because somebody might let somebody else use their card or the card might have been stolen, but way more reliable than identifying somebody via a picture).
So all this hassle and cost to have a parallel process to try to ID people like me who pays in cash to sell my purchasing habits information, when most people are like you and just give them their ID on a platter by paying with card, doesn't make any business sense.
They ain't doing it because they can't, they ain't doing it because so long as the market is flooded with customer purchasing habits data obtained cheaply by just using the information from their card payment, deploying facial recognition technology to match buyers to purchases wouldn't actually be profitable.
Just because it's technologically possible to go after the hard to get info using a complex process, doesn't mean it makes business sense to do it, especially when they're already making money with a far simpler and cheaper process.