I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.

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windowliker an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.

As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.

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Dylan16807 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Terabytes for an entire chain isn't that much, actually?

Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.

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Normal_gaussian an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.

	▲	windowliker 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.