The FAA is set to loosen rules to let people fly drones beyond their "line of sight. On Thursday, I published a story about the police-tech giant Flock Safety selling its drones to the private sector to track shoplifters. Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now leads Flock's drone efforts, described the ideal scenario: A security team at a Home Depot, say, launches a drone from the roof that follows shoplifting suspects to their car. The drone tracks their car through the streets, transmitting its live video feed directly to the police. It's a vision that, unsurprisingly, alarms civil liberties advocates. They say it will expand the surveillance state created by police drones, license-plate readers, and other crime tech, which has allowed law enforcement to collect massive amounts of private data without warrants.

Shoplifting poses a significant challenge for retailers, resulting in billions of dollars in annual losses. Traditional security measures often fall short, highlighting the need for intelligent solutions capable of detecting shoplifting behaviors in real time. This paper frames shoplifting detection as an anomaly detection problem, focusing on the identification of deviations from typical shopping patterns. We introduce PoseLift, a privacy-preserving dataset specifically designed for shoplifting detection, addressing challenges such as data scarcity, privacy concerns, and model biases. PoseLift is built in collaboration with a retail store and contains anonymized human pose data from real-world scenarios. By preserving essential behavioral information while anonymizing identities, PoseLift balances privacy and utility. We benchmark state-of-the-art pose-based anomaly detection models on this dataset, evaluating performance using a comprehensive set of metrics. Our results demonstrate that pose-based approaches achieve high detection accuracy while effectively addressing privacy and bias concerns inherent in traditional methods. As one of the first datasets capturing real-world shoplifting behaviors, PoseLift offers researchers a valuable tool to advance computer vision ethically and will be publicly available to foster innovation and collaboration. The dataset is available at https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/PoseLift.

A supermarket chain has become Britain's first to return to fully-staffed checkouts after axing most of its self-service tills after its boss said: 'We like to talk to people.' Booths - which has 27 stores in the North across Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Cheshire - has been finding the machines to be'slow, unreliable and impersonal' and decided that'rather than artificial intelligence, we're going for actual intelligence'. Staff at the upmarket firm, dubbed the'northern Waitrose', added that they wanted to ensure customers were served by people with'high levels of warm, personal care'. The move by Booths, which was founded in 1847, has provoked much debate on the benefits of self-checkouts as retailers continue to battle a shoplifting epidemic. The British Independent Retailers Association said there could be a'reality check with the current level of retail theft and self-service tills becoming an expensive risk'. All but two Booths stores will put staff back on the tills - with the exceptions being in the Lake District at Keswick and Windermere which can become very busy at times. Booths managing director Nigel Murray said staff at the northern chain'like to talk to people' Booths managing director Nigel Murray told BBC Radio Lancashire today: 'Our customers have told us this over time, that the self-scan machines that we've got in our stores they can be slow, they can be unreliable, they're obviously impersonal.

Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers – also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark – saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system". The letter, from Liberty, Amnesty International and Big Brother Watch, among others, questions the unchecked rollout of a technology that has provoked fierce criticism over its impact on privacy and human rights at a time when the European Union is seeking to ban the technology in public spaces through proposed legislation. "Facial recognition technology notoriously misidentifies people of colour, women and LGBTQ people, meaning that already marginalised groups are more likely to be subject to an invasive stop by police, or at increased risk of physical surveillance, monitoring and harassment by workers in your stores," the letter states.Its authors also express dismay that the move will "reverse steps" that big retailers introduced during the Black Lives Matter movement, including high-profile commitments to be champions of diversity, equality and inclusion. Meanwhile, concerns over the broadening use of facial recognition technology have further intensified after the emergence of details of a police watchlist used to justify the contentious decision to use biometric surveillance at July's Formula One British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Major retailers in the US are already using facial recognition cameras to spy on shoppers, a campaigning group has warned. The tech - usually associated with authoritative regimes like China - is being used both to identify shoplifters and serve'personalized' adverts. Caitlin Seeley George of anti-face recognition campaign group Fight for the Future told DailyMail.com Walgreens and Macy's are among the largest retailers to adopt the technology, deploying it in hundreds of stores across the country. And it is not just America - Britain is also adopting the tech.

A NEW creepy AI technology has revealed a plan for world domination to its users along with instructions on how to shoplift and make bombs. The tech company OpenAI created a new bot called ChatGPT, which generates convincing dialogue from a short writing prompt. While this technology is meant to formulate helpful solutions, with the right prompt, it can also give you criminal responses. ChatGPT's safeguards, which are meant to prevent the AI from using offensive content, can be removed, depending on what the user says. Vice gave a few examples of safeguard overrides.

Only one in four Americans (26 percent) think government should strictly limit the use of facial recognition technology, according to a new survey from the Center for Data Innovation--and that support drops even further if it would come at the expense of public safety. Fewer than one in five Americans (18 percent) would agree with strictly limiting the technology if that is the tradeoff, while a solid majority (55 percent) would disagree. Similarly, only 20 percent of Americans say government should strictly limit use of facial recognition if it would mean airports can't use the technology to speed up security lines, while a 54 percent majority would disagree with such a limit. And just 24 percent want strict limits if it would prevent stores from using the technology to stop shoplifting, while 49 percent would oppose such a tradeoff. There were some differences in these opinions based on age, with older Americans more likely to oppose government limits on the technology.

Security cameras are everywhere, but artificial intelligence is changing the way they are being used. KRON4 tested one such system at a grocery store in San Jose to see how A.I. is preventing shoplifting. Picture this scenario, someone walks into Lunardi's Market on Meridian Street. They decide to take home a nice bottle of Merlot -- only they also decide not to pay. But before they can walk out the door, the store manager steps in and stops them.

Welcome to the supermarkets of the future. They may look and feel like the supermarkets we are all used to – and stock the same bread, butter and bananas – but these shops are now fitted out with more than £1m of the latest technology that their bosses promise will put an end to our biggest frustration (queueing) and our most persistent crime (shoplifting). Jill French, a legal secretary in her 30s, wearing a sharp navy suit and matching beret, has just left a Tesco Express on London's Holborn Viaduct empty-handed. It's coming up to 6.30pm on a Thursday and, like dozens of others, French has popped in for a few essentials on her way home. "I just went in to grab pasta, milk and some broccoli," she says.

Shoplifting has been on the rise according to Gartner research in retail stores in the USA and UK where despite security cameras installed, theft cases continue to rise. Retail stores continue to suffer from theft losses characterized by shoplifting¹ and artificial intelligence is offering timely assistance. By working with facial recognition technology, artificial intelligence² is using algorithms to determine the behavioral patterns of shoppers in a bid to reduce theft cases. Vaak⁹ from Japan is a start-up leading the way where the company recently developed systems run by AI to monitor suspicious attributes among shoppers and alert retail store managers through their smartphones. While AI is usually envisioned as a smart personal assistant, the technology is accurate at spotting weird behavior.