Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

  • nationalize_amazon [comrade/them]
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    113 months ago

    I spent a decent amount of time thinking of how best to shoplift from there, lol. My best idea is that with some decent slight of hand, you could easily fool the system into thinking you took 1 product instead of 2, or you returned an item when you actually didn’t. And then you can challenge your receipt to make them fix it. There are a lot of camera angles, but they are only 14fps, and it can still be pretty tough to tell what someone is actually doing even if they are acting totally normally and non-maliciously.

    Another funny theory I had is that to beat the tracking system, you could lie down or something. It’s not something I ever tested in practice, but their tracking system relies heavily on the assumption that everyone is standing upright, so maybe if you rolled on the floor a little it would get confused. But when it gets confused it goes to one of those low paid workers in India or Costa Rica, so it might get corrected manually.

      • nationalize_amazon [comrade/them]
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        123 months ago

        I mean, they test it a lot. It seems like the general philosophy though was that the ways of fooling the system reliably are somewhat convoluted, so if someone is willing to do all that, just let them lol.

        Amusingly, one of the particular vulnerabilities that they mentioned having problems with in the UK in particular was people just brazenly going into a store, taking down some cameras or other equipment (networking equipment, edge compute, etc.) and Just Walking Out.