Wednesday Walk: Amazon is Watching
The joy of spring radishes, a closer look at facial recognition
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Seeking Joy
It’s hard to find joy for me right now. Refugee camps are being burned and babies are being decapitated in Rafah. U.S. politicians seem unwilling to stop the killing and no other country seems willing to step in. Things are bleak.
One way that I stay grounded is to look for small ways to connect to the earth and its cycles. It’s a reminder that there is much to be grateful for and that joy can be simple.
My most recent source of joy is the simple spring radish.
A few months ago, I shared the news that Red Fire Farm in Granby, MA had lost their barn and farm store to a fire. This was especially sad news for me because our new house is just a few minutes down the road from this amazing place.
In just a few short weeks, the team at Red Fire has been able to regroup and start to rebuild, opening a small outdoor farm stand a few weekends ago that includes self serve produce.
I have stopped there a few times lately to load up on radishes, more specifically French Breakfast Radishes. I first tried this more mild variety at the Wardensville Garden Market on our visit to West Virginia and have been hooked ever since.
For most people, buying radishes is not very exciting. Supermarkets carry them year round from places like California. I’m not sure that many people could distinguish a supermarket radish from a locally grown one.
But as somebody who eats almost exclusively local, in season produce, most of the winter, I’m eating varieties of radish that store well and were harvested in the fall, like watermelon and daikon.
So tasting the first spring radishes is a treat, as they are much more pungent and tasty than their overwintered counterparts. And yes, I do think they taste different than a supermarket radish.
It’s these simple connections to the natural world that help me feel a bit more human. It’s a feeling that I need now more than ever.
It’s Good to See Your Face
Last year, I wrote about how my local Whole Foods Market added self checkout lanes that include a camera on your face while you are ringing up items. Or rather, I should say, their registers show you a feed of the camera mounted on their self checkout registers, as many of these registers include such cameras. Since first observing this trend, I have largely grown accustomed to seeing myself on the register and learned to ignore the strangeness of watching myself ring up items.
But I became extra aware of the camera on a recent grocery visit and it got me thinking about how we have really allowed our privacy rights to be eroded for the sake of convenience.
Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market in 2017, but it wasn’t clear exactly why. A year later, Amazon purchased Ring, makers of the video camera doorbells that have become ubiquitous.
Since the Amazon acquisition, Prime members receive discounts when shopping at Whole Foods, which are applied to the purchase by scanning a QR code from the Amazon app at the register.
While I was using self checkout the other day, looking at myself on the register, and pulling up the Amazon app, something caught my eye. Amazon was advertising 40% off of Ring doorbells on the home screen of the app.
At that price, they were practically giving away the gadgets, which seemed noteworthy. Why would Amazon be willing to take such a loss for a product that they had spent $1 billion acquiring a few years earlier.
And it occurred to me: Amazon wants my facial data. Whole Foods, Ring, the Echo Show, and other similar parts of the Amazon ecosystem are all part of that goal.
I’m not saying Amazon bought Whole Foods with the sole intention of making a database of our faces, but I feel like it’s become a useful side effect of getting into the grocery business.
By offering a slight discount on groceries when I scan the app at checkout, Amazon can now tie my face directly to my name, my purchase history, and so much more. They also have added the ability to pay by palm now, which means they are tracking some form of handprint data as well. I have tried as hard as possible to avoid using the palm reader, but apparently some people are using it.
Amazon has facial data from retail stores, but also from our home doorbells. Anytime we enter our own houses, visit a friend’s house, or deliver a package to a home, there’s a possible data point that can be added to a larger set of data tracking our movements.
And of course, Amazon is not the only large company mining our personal data. So what are companies doing with all of this information?
I found an interesting article by Courtney Wolfe for Loss Prevention Magazine that details how retailers are using facial recognition in their stores:
“When a repeat offender enters the store, the manager receives an alert, and they’re able to approach the customer with the goal of offering excellent customer service, rather than apprehending them. This process was enough to help the retailer stop a shocking 90 percent of their repeat offenders.
‘The first day we turned the tech on, we were training the store managers and the training stopped because we received alerts on three ORC boosters and stopped all three of them with great customer service—and we only had a few hundred faces in our database to start with,’ the executive said. ‘So, we knew on day one it was going to be a game changer, and we quickly rolled it out in another fifty stores and started to see win after win.’”
The same article cites how this data is also being used by police departments around the country:
“States and cities are starting to realize this, with some reversing facial recognition bans or restrictions they had previously implemented. The city council of New Orleans, for example, approved an ordinance in July 2022 that restores the use of facial recognition tools to aid in criminal investigations by the New Orleans Police Department, though under new guardrails, and subject to a comprehensive use policy approved by the state and federal government. Earlier this year, Virginia lawmakers replaced the state’s ban on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology with comprehensive rules. In West Lafayette, Indiana, city council members rejected a proposed ban of the technology for city agencies.”
We often trade some of this privacy for convenience without giving it a second thought: “Sure, Amazon might know my every move, but I can also tell when my package has been delivered. And if I’m not breaking the law, does it really matter?”
We may say this to ourselves to soothe our minds, but where does that mentality actually come from? It’s a talking point of the people that want our data. The notion of selling our data has become completely normalized, but it really shouldn’t be.
The downside of our eroded privacy rights has become especially pronounced when it comes to the Gaza Solidarity Encampments on college campuses, as authorities have used surveillance and facial recognition software to punish and prosecute student protestors:
“Video surveillance for security reasons is fairly common on college campuses, but as law enforcement agencies increasingly use facial recognition technology to identify suspects, that has led to more concerns among protestors that they could be targeted or doxed for expressing their opinion.
That could result in everything from lifelong repercussions for what could be peaceful protesting to threats to the safety of students who are identified (correctly or incorrectly) as protestors. And given questions of the accuracy (especially for people of color) of some facial recognition software, it could also result in legal threats to universities.”
In 2018, it was reported that Amazon was selling its facial recognition data to law enforcement. That practice was suspended in 2020 because of charges of racial bias, but it was reported earlier this year that the FBI is again working with Amazon.
The battle over our personal data and how it is used is only beginning. Sadly, many of us, including me, have already lost.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.