> Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll said a malfunction caused the camera to take photos. The machine, provided by the vending supplier Canteen, features a touch screen and uses a camera for people to purchase coffee with a card, she said. But Carroll added that Amazon offers the coffee to employees free of charge and has no practical use for the camera.
Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question. Was there an issue of people stealing coffee cards, so they used facial-ID matching? If so that seems like an expensive and authoritarian solution to a minor problem, and it doesn't make sense that the machine would do this if Amazon isn't using the cards. And it doesn't fully explain this:
> An employee at the DMP1 Amazon Delivery Station was getting coffee on February 9 when he saw a button on the coffee vending machine’s touch screen that read “gallery.”....The employee pushed the button and came across around half a dozen random photos of the breakroom, according to Canaday.
If the photos were close-ups of employees making coffee then I would buy the explanation that this was a feature Amazon forgot to disable. But if they are truly "random photos of the breakroom" then this explanation doesn't make sense to me.
> Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question. Was there an issue of people stealing coffee cards, so they used facial-ID matching?
There's huge loss/fraud prevention value in creating visual audit trails.
You don't need to do facial ID matching to recognize recurring theft. You just need a historical photo to correlate who used a card (that you subsequently might learn was a fraudulent charge).
Back around 2003 a coworker thought she left her credit card at a store (I think Target). She called them, they asked her to read the number off of the receipt, pulled up the video of her transaction, and told her she had put the card back in her wallet/purse.
I was surprised they had that level of integration and can't imagine what they've got these days.
On the one hand, I'm not surprised at all that there are security people in the company that can instantly pull up security cam footage of a register from the receipt number. That makes total sense.
But on the other hand, I never would have guessed that a customer service rep would have access to the system -- or even that if they had to transfer it to the security department, that the security department would be allowed to use the footage for anything customer-facing like that.
Still, that's kinda cool and helpful! Assuming it can't be used for any kind of nefarious invasion-of-privacy uses...
If I left something at a store I would be calling the store itself which I think to this day will eventually get you an internal store employee. Seems like that would be an easy bounce to the security person.
There's a lot of ATMs in Targets. If they have that much watching, I think I want to stand with my hand over the buttons now.
Although someone could probably watch your fingers at the checkout lane put in your pin. Camera script to correlate fingers to access pins automatedly. Machine vision is so much more advanced. Four finger movements, four numbers, tada, debit card access. I could probably write that with ML Kit.
Correlated to your exact receipt, purchases, and time of purchase (with enough fidelity to say "you put your card in your pocket at ##:##"). Track your card through the system, and what bank/clearing house is passing the transaction. When did this exact number amount of money go through and where did the lines send the data? What account was the final transaction processed through?
this is absolutely impressive, but target is in no way representative of the avg. level of surveillance/LP tech in retail. they are notorious for being at the leading edge of technology and dedication. Their forensics actually did contract govt work at some point in time.
It's hard to keep competency from developing when you have (frequent, sophisticated attacker) + (financial motive to fund countermeasures and resourcing).
Meanwhile, someone backs into the taillight on my truck in the parking lot of the local Kroger, and they have zero surveillance footage showing it, despite giving them a date and a 40 minute window of shopping based on my receipt timestamp. sigh
This answer is too simple. For example, target has incredible surveillance of the parking lot so that they can correlate thieves with vehicles.
I think the real answer is that Kroger simply does not take operations seriously. Theres evidence for this in their app, their self checkout experience, how often sales are not applied, the quality of their produce, how dirty the stores are, the way their merger and acquisition stores are all 1/3 integrated, and more im sure
I had someone massively door ding me at Kroger like 15 years ago, and talked to their security and they had cameras but the angle didn't show enough of the door ding to definitely say the person parked next to me did it. I suppose it depends on your specific location, but it's not like they don't have surveillance at all.
I think the easy read is that the machine is a commercial machine that can be deployed in places where the functionality is needed. That is, this is not a custom machine for this location. (The story states that the coffee is free in this location.)
I've worked at several places that had self-serve snack bins that you were expected to pay for, but the machine was just a pay kiosk, not a vending machine.
Typically, the way these operations work is that either the employer contracts out the snack bin to a vendor, or the employer buys the snacks themselves, then charges the employees for them. In either case, if the expectation is to pay for the snacks, and you don't, that's theft.
I have complicated opinions about whether or not an employer should charge their own employees for break-room snacks, but once an employer decides that they should charge for the snacks, then the loss is clear when a snack is taken without paying.
> Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question.
The sheer number of people in here espousing great volumes of text to explain the ulterior motives of a shitty OEM android control panel on a vending machine crashing out of kiosk mode is utterly unbelievable.
> shitty OEM android control panel on a vending machine crashing out of kiosk mode
This spot in Seattle has a digital dot matrix sign (says "Surface Mount Technology" in the street view) that has been in factory reset mode, cycling through a demo of its fonts and specs for its serial port, for at least five years.
Sigital marquees, especially old ones, are hilariously expensive to fix or replace. A client of mine has one like that and was quoted over 300k to replace it when a control software failed.
Luckily, we fixed the controller (which is IR based) but I fully understand why one of those signs would stay in that state now.
I am not sure if this comment was directed at me, but the "genuine question" was a genuine question, not rhetorical :) And the answer I was looking for was "the payment cards probably use QR codes instead of magnets/IR/RFID/etc."
On the other hand, maybe a broken vending machine wouldn't be a national talking point if even one person in this entire chain of events had simply accepted that the machine was malfunctioning and might not actually be an instrument of the surveillance state.
Amazon is well known for surveilling its staff. Why act surprised that staff think the worst when they find another piece of surveillance gear in the breakroom?
This is a good point. Many are in glass houses on this issue as who amongst us can say that they have bought a vending machine that doesn’t come with a built in camera
Don't necessarily disagree, but also there's a lot of conspiracy theorist nonsense here for something that could well simply be explained away by "Cheap Android off-the-shelf tablet used as a UI for something". It would've been useful to see some screenshots/pictures of the UI before writing a scare-mongering article about it.
gorkish's comment does at least bring things back down to earth.
I agree with that, but I'm also surprised the vendor didn't go through the process of custom-ordering the off-the-shelf tablet in an MOQ so they could shave cost off by flagging things like the camera as a DNP part.
Not sure if anyone has been to shake shake with self order screens lately but those device still have the 'new note' shortcut still enabled. I would leave random notes and come back to see if anyone ever discovered it.
If so it should be faced at the ground if that were the case. But that would require privacy considerations by engineers who design cameras into their hardware :/
It makes a ton of sense when you consider that it's cheaper to buy a freight train full of cheap Android tablets with front-facing cameras than it is to engineer a custom device with a camera that faces downwards.
There is no expectation of privacy of your face when engaging in any kind of commercial transaction.
To the contrary, it's an essential measure for helping to track down theft and fraud.
Every self-checkout takes a photo of your face. Every ATM. And basically every store where you check out with a cashier has security cameras capturing your face from angles.
So there is no reason why engineers would want to angle the camera downwards.
> There is no expectation of privacy of your face when engaging in any kind of commercial transaction.
I expect to be informed that recording will be occuring given I live in a two party consent state.
There is an expectation of privacy in certain circumstances, ex law office, Drs office, and the break room (given discussing working conditions in a break room is a protected activity where recording is disallowed)
Every customer support hotline I've ever dialed prefaces the message with 'this conversation may be recorded'. Most ATMs have a video surveillance tag somewhere nearby.
Regardless, if Amazon bought commercial products with recording devices and installed them in the break room, that's ultimately Amazon's responsibility. Perhaps it was an honest mistake, but IMHO Amazon has failed to Earn Trust and Disagree and Commit to following the law when it comes to labor regulations
In case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about taking basic video/still security footage while paying for something. There's no such thing as two-party consent for that.
That has nothing to do with audio recording, which seems to be what you're talking about. I'm not talking about audio, nor is the original article in question, nor the coffee machine in question.
I don't think the media of recording matters so much as that there exists a recording. I agree that in other contexts this might be less troublesome, but Amazon has a history of retaliation against labor organization, and it's quite possible (I'm by no means saying certain or even probable) that this is another instance of such.
Well, save for the break room if you're an employer. Any form of surveillance of a break room by the employer opens you up to litigation afaik. If not legally, at least ethically.
The regular UPC style linear barcodes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode#Linear_barcodes ) can be read with a laser. You can do neat things with spinning mirrors to handle orientation changes (supermarket checkout scanner).
However, they can't handle the information density of a 2d barcode and the transformations needed to scan a 2d barcode at an arbitrary orientation and reconstruct the original information are more finicky than including what is now a cheap digital camera. The difference between a digital still camera and a digital video is how often you read it out.
You can get a camera for under $10 ( https://www.adafruit.com/product/5733 ) and the ease of using that in combination with a library that can handle 2d barcodes in any orientation is much less work to use than trying to make a scanning laser system to read a 2d barcode.
because a super-obvious spy move is to use something ordinary but also add surveillance to it?
if you have been to a secure Amazon facility you know that there are cameras in every room and in every hall and at every point of entry and exit. Management appears to make no excuses about using those for every possible purpose. The people that work there seem in "constant compliance" mode, and there are more than a few wrecked individuals "just making a living" .. is this a social pattern for the most successful companies to emulate? It seems to be much more like the Ottoman Empire than any Western thing I know of..
My former workplace had a Canteen kiosk and the camera in question was a webcam at the top center of the screen. It showed your video during the checkout process.
Bonus item: Canteen had to mail me a check for $30 after losing a class action lawsuit. You could register a fingerprint to access your account with, but we were in Illinois and they did not collect a biometrics waiver during enrollment.
> Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card?
Many times people who steal credit cards will try to make small purchases to validate cards. Since there is no human interaction someone who has stolen ~10 cards could try each one by buying a $1-2 coffee and seeing which ones work. The machine takes photos which could then be turned over if/when the card holder reports fraud.
So they enter a secure facility with their already vetted credentials and CCTV in operation to try out stolen credit cards? Or they could do those same validation tests at home on a dodgy website.
Do you think using stolen credit cards is a big problem in Amazon warehouses, because what I think is this isn't a bug but a feature to detect who is working and who is slacking.
> uses a camera for people to purchase coffee with a card, she said. But Carroll added that Amazon offers the coffee to employees free of charge and has no practical use for the camera.
I'm not sure why you quoted that because there is a camera in operation and whether Amazon 'has a practical' purpose for it or not is irrelevant here.
Would be like finding a camera in a girls locker room and then saying 'we have no need for that'. Like what the hell is doing there is the real question and I suspect it does have a practical purpose for Amazon.
Maybe because it's some messy custom Android setup that was put together by an intern in 3 months and it piggybacks on the existing camera functionality.
This is the answer. My work tablets are android based and taking pictures isn't supposed to be part of the workflow, but sometimes by using random button presses, you can accidentially bring up the camera/gallery (its supposed to be locked out, but our IT dept didn't do a good job of totally locking it out).
>Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question.
Check the POS card pads at your local Starbucks, drug store, grocery store, etc. ALL of the new ones have cameras on them now (not just the self-checkout kiosks), and it's reasonable to assume they are snapping pics of everyone to assist with fraud investigations.
Sometimes I carry around little stickers with me and cover the cameras up.
> The breakroom in question has two other cameras present: a security camera on the ceiling and another security camera attached to a self-checkout kiosk employees use when buying food, Canaday said.
It's totally normal for workplaces to have cameras in public employee areas.
The article tries to make a point:
> He said that Amazon workers must feel free to talk about work in the breakroom without the fear of being surveilled.
But there's no microphone in question here, the article even says so specifically. Conversations are not being snooped on here.
And the camera is used for scanning cards to purchase coffee with, so it's not exactly nefarious.
Maybe in the UK or US, not in the parts of the EU where I have lived, in Sweden there would probably be some serious discomfort if an employer put up cameras to record office workers
Absolutely. At every large company I've ever worked at, there have been security cameras in every open work area, every hallway, every elevator, every common area.
Could plausibly be incompetence. It would have limited spying capabilities. Could plausibly be denial to reduce backlash. I'd be interested in how widespread those coffee machines are.
If I worked in a warehouse job with a strong anti-union position I'd assume the whole place was bugged. Even convincing people to act as if they are under surveillance would be a huge anti-union win.
Uhhh, if you work an office job at a company of any significant size, your work laptop is loaded with monitoring software. Might be labeled “antivirus” or “threat detection” but it can and does watch everything you do. Perhaps there are union rules against that somewhere, but I doubt it.
Sure, true. But I would bet that, whatever the country, a pile of people at every large company are trying to monitor the maximum amount of your activity they can without breaking the law.
You used the word "invasive" -- that's of course an ambiguous phrase to the common person, but it's not going to ambiguous to the security/fraud group at a big company. They will know that they can do X but not Y, and they will do the most of X that they can.
It varies, for sure, but more security sensitive organisations like... anything that works with computers these days will need to have their systems locked down, which includes access control and possibly internet monitoring, at the very least to block malware websites. As well as a block on VPNs and other ways to circumvent those blocks.
Of course, this quickly escalates to "no porn", "no video games", and other non-work things. But those are usually larger organizations where they lose track of individuals and their behaviour.
Managers surveilling employees is also known as management. It's a fairly long standing and widely accepted practice. Is it really very different when done with a webcam compared to a Mark I eyeball?
> Founded in August of 2019, Sahan Journal is a nonprofit digital newsroom dedicated to reporting for immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota.
> [...] East African workers, who comprise a sizable amount of Amazon’s Minnesota workforce. Local East African Muslim workers have a history of protesting the company’s wages and workplace conditions, including its handling of workers’ daily prayer practices and requests for time off for Muslim holidays.
Or instead of immediately lunching into your misanthropic fantasy you could simply click through to notice that it’s a publication that ‘Sahan Journal is a nonprofit digital newsroom dedicated to reporting for immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota’ but I guess ‘people be woke’ is much easier and pointless discourse ruining comment to throw out.
Does anyone else think that fact that they video tape us at every Whole Foods, Target, Walmart self-checkout means they could easily apply facial recognition and be recording our every purchase even if you pay cash.
IIRC, the Internet's first webcam was a view of a coffee pot to let people remotely see if it was full/empty; now, the coffee pot camera is used for surveillance.
As someone who has had employees steal thousands of dollars in expensive specialized tools, I can tell you that people do behave badly behind closed doors and will lie to your face when confronted.
For example, around 15 years ago we had these guys steal multiple crimpers ($400 to $800 ea.), CNC cutting tools ($100 to $400 ea.) and accessories in the thousands of dollars. Even seemingly stupid things, like 300 meter rolls of wire.
We brought them into the conference room and confronted them with the situation by saying: We know you stole these items (presented a list). If you return them within the next couple of days you will be fired and no charges will be filed.
They lied, said they did not steal a thing and were offended by the false accusation.
We then played the surveillance videos on the conference room screen. Their tune changed dramatically to admitting what they did and asking forgiveness. Of course, this entire meeting was also recorded.
They were given one opportunity to not lie, return what they stole and be fired. Instead, they were arrested.
When you are working for a company, privacy isn't to be expected outside of the bathrooms.
There are other issues as well. It is really unfortunate that, as a business owner, you are forced to think defensively in these matters. It really is. I am a firm believer in that people are basically good. Mainly because behaving badly in person (let's not talk about online, that's a different matter) can have serious consequences.
In that category if you hire women --no reason not to-- you better have security cameras everywhere allowed by law. Why? Because of two things. First, women can be subject to serious sexual harassment. This has to be taken seriously and acted upon. Second, a woman can falsely acuse someone at work of this and absolutely ruin their lives. Video surveillance, if thorough enough, should provide one of the requisite safety layer.
Of course, employees have to be made aware of these policies. I don't know if it is a legal requirement (it might be in some jurisdictions), it's the right thing to do.
Sadly, we have to use such measures just because of a very small number of idiots who don't seem to have a brain.
> When you are working for a company, privacy isn't to be expected outside of the bathrooms.
For better and for worse, that is the case ^^^
Back in the 90s (before cell phones), I had to give a training to a bunch of managers to teach them how to eavesdrop on employees' phone calls. I asked if this was legal and was told yes, the phones are company property. That never sat well with me. However, it got worse: I later found out that one of the managers was having an extramarital affair with an employee and wanted to monitor what she was saying to her husband or something weird like that.
> First, women can be subject to serious sexual harassment. This has to be taken seriously and acted upon. Second, a woman can falsely acuse someone at work of this and absolutely ruin their lives. Video surveillance, if thorough enough, should provide one of the requisite safety layer.
Video captures little to none of this unless someone is being physically molested or raped. Sexual harassment (in the actual legal sense, not woke theocratic law) usually takes place verbally or over SMS/WhatsApp on personal devices.
We're dealing with a generation of people trained in stagecraft. Trust nothing.
> Video captures little to none of this unless someone is being physically molested or raped.
That's why I said "one of the...". I think these days it is an absolute must for more reasons than I care to list here. Let's just say I've seen weird stuff happen. People are in a range between "that was funny" to "stupid beyond description".
My views on "surveillance" have evolved over the years.
I'm in favor of local, private, surveillance of private property.
I'm not in favor of aggregating that surveillance in a way that allows warrantless search by government officials.
Nowadays we have to define what we mean by warrantless search. In this context, I specifically mean any system or human associated with a government having access to the footage in any way prior to obtaining a warrant. This includes indexing the footage into a database accessible by law enforcement without a physical transfer of property.
When it comes to my property, I have surveillance. It's all offline. It goes to a set of HDDs with redundant onsite backups. The system can survive a power outage for a _long_ time on battery backups, all the cameras are PoE and the storage device and wifi network for accessing the footage are all on a dedicated backup power circuit.
If something happens on my property, I have recordings of it. Those recordings exist to protect my family and our assets. Proving my innocence, or helping us find and recover my kids, if we ever have "one bad day."
I choose what to do with those recordings. The recordings self destruct on a timer. And it's not accessible without a warrant. You have to go through me to get them.
This is in contrast to the form of surveillance I'm not in favor of, which appears to have been normalized over my lifetime in the U.S.
The U.S. scoops up a huge amount of surveillance data into databases, and then focuses the conversation on whether or not those databases can be queried without a warrant.
It's a mind bending situation where our government has managed to reclassify "search" as querying a database, claiming the search didn't happen when the information was indexed into the database.
The physical analogue, for me, is a government official coming into your home once a day. They take a complete inventory of all of your property. They put that inventory into a folder, and then place the folder in a filing cabinet promising not to look at it unless they suspect its relevant to a crime. Then they claim that the search doesn't happen until the look in the filing cabinet.
No good sir, the search happened when you aggregated the inventory of my home.
There is a nuance here that this analogue uses _content_ and not _metadata_ - but I'd posit that for many privacy advocates that nuance isn't a meaningful distinction.
If the camera was used for surveillance and the surveillance pictures got indexed by the gallery app, why were there only "half a dozen random photos"? One would expect something like scheduled pictures on some timer. A surveillance camera that over its lifetime took 6 blurry photos at random times does not seem like a meaningful surveillance tool, and "it actually took lots of pictures but only a handful of them accidentally wound up in the gallery" only works in a very lay understanding of technology.
I know there is a strong human impulse to paint the situation in black and white as evil megacorp versus hapless but plucky workers uncovering its scheme, but despite the workers surely being the more sympathetic side in this dispute my first instinct would be to check if, along with the exposed gallery app, the machine doesn't also have an exposed camera app somewhere, which the labor organisers could have used to take these half a dozen pictures before "exposing" them to galvanise support. Second most likely theory would be some seldom-triggered code path in the coffee machine making it snap a diagnostic picture when it detects excessive vibration, intermittent power loss or some other disturbance.
Amazon doesn't really need video surveillance in the coffee room for union suppression. They just need the appearance of surveillance, hence the camera embedded in a device with no use for one, and a gallery left wide open. The paranoia is the point.
I know someone who works part time at an Amazon warehouse and they have a real problem with people sleep walking through their shifts. We decided they must have the “do nothings” factored in to the equation. Considering how desperate they are for bodies, if a do nothing does something, then it’s a wash.
That's what I'm thinking. Surveillance of the workplace... just isn't that weird? Everyone does this. There's no particular expectation of privacy in a public workplace.
I guess maybe one could argue that a breakroom should be excluded, but then that falls afoul of the analysis that sometimes people steal from vending machines and the devices need surveillance to prevent that.
Although it is already noted that this was a third party vendor error,
an other plausible use is Amazon's passion for automation (e.g., lights, air-conditioning), and squeeze a penny where possible and remove human interaction.
> The breakroom in question has two other cameras present: a security camera on the ceiling and another security camera attached to a self-checkout kiosk employees use when buying food, Canaday said. Employees are aware of both security cameras, which are clearly visible and expected, Canaday said.
The problem isn't that there's a camera in the breakroom, it's that the camera malfunctioned and took pictures that no one expected.
Why is a camera involved in purchasing coffee with a card? Genuine question. Was there an issue of people stealing coffee cards, so they used facial-ID matching? If so that seems like an expensive and authoritarian solution to a minor problem, and it doesn't make sense that the machine would do this if Amazon isn't using the cards. And it doesn't fully explain this:
> An employee at the DMP1 Amazon Delivery Station was getting coffee on February 9 when he saw a button on the coffee vending machine’s touch screen that read “gallery.”....The employee pushed the button and came across around half a dozen random photos of the breakroom, according to Canaday.
If the photos were close-ups of employees making coffee then I would buy the explanation that this was a feature Amazon forgot to disable. But if they are truly "random photos of the breakroom" then this explanation doesn't make sense to me.