Advance of retail biometrics runs up against corporate trust, transparency concerns

Retail biometrics are being adopted to secure payments, prevent theft and less often for use cases like employee time and attendance or access control. But consumers and lawmakers alike appear to be leaping from bread-crumbs of evidence to conclusions about implementations or plans to deploy biometrics in American stores.

Proposed legislation in Massachusetts would bar grocery stores from using biometrics to raise prices for certain people or targeted advertising.

Bil H99, “An Act Relative to Surveillance Pricing in Grocery Stores,” is currently headed to a third reading in the state house of representatives. The Bill contains a right of private action for consumers, meaning that if it passes,  they can directly sue a grocery store that uses their biometrics in violation of the law. It has already passed through the state house’s IT and steering committees.

The Bill is sponsored by Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, who acknowledged the practice of using biometrics for dynamic pricing

“While this technology has not yet spread widely in Massachusetts, it’s an imminent threat, with large chains like Kroger and Walmart already rolling it out across the country,” she wrote on Facebook in April.

Both Kroger and Walmart have committed to not implementing dynamic pricing, Worcester Business Journal reports, and Kroger has said it will not deploy facial recognition. In fact, no U.S. retailer has ever admitted to using biometrics to inform dynamic pricing changes.

The former assistant attorney general who wrote Massachusetts’ 1987 law on food store prices, Edgar Dworsky, criticizes the bill as more likely to block discounted prices than inflated ones.

“If you are not banning the collection of biometric data to start with, why not simply prevent its use for the purpose of imposing higher than the standard or established price?” he said in written testimony opposing the Bill.

The ACLU of Massachusetts has offered partial support for the proposal, suggesting it be expanded to cover any method of charging different prices, not just biometrics collection.

Bounding box in Home Depot self-checkout screen prompts lawsuit

Biometrics are much more widely-used in retail settings in America today for check-out processes, mostly to authenticate payments.

But a lawsuit filed against Home Depot alleges the company has been violating the Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act with a loss prevention system deployed at it self-checkout kiosks.

Named plaintiff Benjamin Jankowski discovered a bounding box around his face in the screen on a Home Depot self-checkout kiosk, Law360 reports. Bounding boxes are typically used in face detection to pick out a distinct object, such as a face, before extracting and comparing face biometrics.

No notice of biometrics collection or associated data storage policy is posted, as required to use the technology under BIPA. But Jankowski believes the system is processing and storing biometric data as part of a theft-prevention system, according to the complaint.

A lawsuit was filed against Home Depot under BIPA in September, 2019, alleging its loss prevention program violated the state’s biometric data privacy requirements. That suit was voluntarily dismissed weeks later.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  lawsuits  |  legislation  |  Massachusetts  |  retail biometrics  |  United States