New York City lawmakers are pushing to ban private businesses from using biometric tools like voice and facial recognition software to track the public.
While the desire to use surveillance technology in stores to fight shoplifting is understandable, lawmakers and privacy advocates are worried that the data could be repurposed to profile customers.
The New York City Council has held a hearing over two bills that would ban city landlords and businesses from using facial recognition technology.
- One proposal would make it illegal for any public place to use biometric recognition technology to identify or verify a customer.
- The other would prohibit landlords from installing, activating, or using any biometric recognition technology that identifies tenants or their guests.
In this article we want to focus on some of the reasons behind these proposals.
For context, it’s good to know that in New York City, businesses that collect biometric data are already required to post standardized signs letting people know.
Let’s look at what happens when your face becomes your ID, and every movement in a store can be turned into another data point.
Why gathering biometric data is considered bad
Collecting biometric data raises several objections. The most pressing ones are:
- Unique but hard-to-erase identifiers. While you can reset a password, your face is harder to change. This means data leaks or abuse of facial templates, gait, or voiceprints can create permanent risks and be linked across databases.
- Accuracy and bias concerns. Studies and civil liberties groups have found that facial recognition system can be error-prone and biased across different groups.
- Lack of meaningful consent. In practice, supermarkets and landlords using facial recognition are giving people a mere theoretical choice. People can submit their biometrics or forego basic services. Critics argue that this undermines genuine consent.
- Chilling effect. The feeling of constantly being watched everywhere you go is an uncomfortable one, and can discourage people from engaging in everyday, legitimate activities.
- Surveillance pricing. This deserves some more explanation, which we’ll cover next.
What is surveillance pricing?
It’s essentially how your face becomes an unerasable loyalty card.
Imagine you go into a local supermarket and notice that different people pay different prices for the same item. Would that feel fair?
Surveillance pricing refers to the use of detailed consumer data and behavioral signals to dynamically adjust prices.
Some characterize it as retailers using big‑data profiles to segment customers into increasingly narrow groups, down to the level of potentially charging each person the maximum the model thinks they are willing to pay.
We already see versions of this online. When you’re looking for airline tickets, for example, prices can change based on various signals. But it can be hard to notice, and companies tell us it’s not personal. But imagine that same logic quietly following you into the supermarket.
How this works online is relatively straightforward: websites track clicks, time on page, cart activity, and past spending to estimate how sensitive you are to price changes.
In physical stores it’s more complex, but not impossible. Data from in-store security systems that also collect biometrics and facial recognition can be combined with loyalty programs, apps, and in‑store Wi‑Fi analytics could, in theory, be combined to build similar profiles.
Electronic shelf labels (ESL) can already allow retailers to change shelf prices instantly across a store or specific sections.
This could lead to situations where wealthier or more brand-loyal customers are quietly charged more. Or vulnerable groups could be targeted with manipulative discounts for higher‑margin or even less healthy products.
What to do?
Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to privacy‑hack your way out of a system that can turn your body into a tracking ID. The most effective fix is boring but powerful: laws with teeth, regulators that actually enforce them, and stores that don’t hide what they’re doing.
You could:
- Avoid stores that openly advertise biometric scanning when there are alternatives.
- Support local and national efforts to regulate biometric tracking and related practices, such as the proposals from the New York City Council.
We shouldn’t have to trade access to food, housing, or basic services for the ability to move through a city without our bodies being mined for data. If we don’t draw that line now, practices like surveillance pricing could quietly bake inequality and discrimination into something as mundane as buying groceries.
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