Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Wegmans Grocery in NYC is employing facial and biometric scanning

2026-01-07T15:12:39Z

Wegmans is a chain dating back a century, based in the NY/New England area. Currently the technology is in then NYC stores. It was deployed with no notice, and customers are given no ability to opt out, short of not shopping in the stores.

They claim that it was installed for 'customer and employee safety'. I think that Madison Entertainment made a similar claim regarding the technology used to keep attorneys out of the Rockettes shows at Madison Square Gardens if their firms are representing companies involved in litigation against them.

I'm glad that I came across this information as one of the states that they operate in is Connecticut, which is a very high probability that we'll be moving there next year. While the technology is apparently not in use outside of NYC, once it's in place in one store, it's pretty easy to install in other stores.

https://www.aol.com/articles/popular-grocery-store-chain-uses-130056099.html

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/the-wegmans-supermarket-chain-is-probably-using-facial-recognition.html

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/01/06/2231258/nyc-wegmans-is-storing-biometric-data-on-shoppers-eyes-voices-and-faces

comments

The EFF releases Rayhunter, lets you see if cell tower spoofing is happening near you

2025-04-26T03:28:58Z

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed an open-source toolkit that, when installed in a very inexpensive portable hot spot, the device will report whether it sees any cell-site simulators (CSS) in your area.

CSS devices, also known as Stingrays, allow law enforcement to capture all identifying information in an area with great precision. It is blanket surveillance. The problem is that while they may have a warrant to surveil Suspect X, they don't have warrants to surveil and capture information on me, you, and everyone around us. Stingrays capture everyone's location information in their effective operating range and logs it. Also, we know very little about how these devices operate: this info is kept under very tight lockdown by the manufacturers and by the law enforcement agencies. There has been very little success in law suits filed to pry this information into direct sunlight.

Some CSS units can go beyond locating the suspect's phones and actually intercept communications. Whether they can intercept everyone's comms who it has sucked into connecting to it isn't known.

The concern is whether CSS is being used to surveil protests and religious gatherings, things that are protected by the First Amendment. There is some evidence that points to this, it is not known how widespread such surveillance may be.

This new toolkit by the EFF is called Rayhunter, i.e. hunting for stingrays. It requires the purchase of an Orbic WiFi hotspot, links in the article to Amazon and eBay show them available for $10-20. The software to turn the Orbic into a Rayhunter is available on the EFF site, but you must be running Linux or Mac OS to install it - no package for Windows at this time. I suppose you could probably run a Linux VM on Windows to install it that way. Once installed and running, in the presence of CSS a red line will appear on the top of the display and the event will be logged, otherwise a green line will show. Connecting to the device's browser will let you review the log file.

The device is not a counter-surveillance tool, it does nothing to interfere with CSS which would be against many FCC rules and probably against local and Federal law. The EFF believes that the Rayhunter is legal under U.S. law, but if you're not in the USA then you should talk to an attorney in your area to see what kind of risk that you might be taking.

Myself, I'd look into rehousing it into something else, like, say, a Gameboy box that also works as a Gameboy, as eventually The Powers That Be will be looking for people carrying this particular model of Orbic devices and plausible deniability might begin running thin. For the paranoids amongst us, perhaps having a tamper switch on the Gameboy that would fry the memory if it's opened incorrectly.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

comments

Over 100 bands and musicians boycott arenas and venues that use facial recognition tech!

2023-07-03T12:22:43Z

YES! YES! YES!

My favorite quotes from the article was the line that it was "morally corrupt"!!!

Bands include Rage Against The Machine and Boots Riley!

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tom-morello-zack-de-la-rocha-facial-recognition-concerts-boycott-1234775909/

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/07/02/0140223/100-bands-including-ratm-boycott-venues-using-facial-recognition-technology

FYI, Rolling Stone is really pushing for subscribers and has a limit on how many articles that you can view free. To bypass this, open a Private Browser Window and copy/paste the URL into it.

comments

Researchers defeat facial recognition video with Natural-Looking Makeup!

2021-09-18T19:50:41Z

Very interesting. Facial recognition (FR) has problems, this is well-known. There are also attacks against it. It's been demonstrated that the Dazzle camouflage used on World War I navy ships is effective because it can't lock on to measure distances between eyes, nose, nostrils, etc to compute geometry.

This attack is different. They took twenty people and blacklisted all of them in the system so they would all be flagged immediately. Then they used a smartphone app to identify "heatmaps" of their faces, and a makeup artist went to work to make up their faces to shadow their faces naturally, and achieved a 98%+ success rate at spoofing the FR system! And their faces look completely authentic and real, even a bit glamorous.

Article on Vice discussing the attack:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78v9m/researchers-defeated-advanced-facial-recognition-tech-using-makeup

comments