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The Target forensics lab (2024)
- kemiller2002 10mo agoThis shows where their priorities lie. This is also the same company that got hacked and lost credit card data of customers through their HVAC system. Bet nothing has really changed there as far as cyber security goes.
- tencentshill 10mo agoAt lease they have a vulnerability disclosure program. https://security.target.com/vdp/ https://security.target.com/vdp/
- kotaKat 10mo agoA lot has changed on the inside at Target since then. They’ve rolled the whole stack in house (even switching to Linux), locked down, and hardened a lot both inside and out. I was amused finding out that cashiers basically no longer sign onto the registers using the register. They sign onto a myDevice (a Zebra handheld) elsewhere and keep it with them, then use that to scan a rotating PDF417 on screen on the register to complete signon as a 2FA device. That’s on top of a lot of built in POS restrictions now to limit where certain transactions (like gift card functions) are completable to avoid people trying to swipe devices or signons from outer area unattended registers.
- bombcar 10mo agoThat signin via device is hilarious because it didn't work the last time I was there; the lady had to find someone else who could sign in for her because her device wasn't connecting or something.
- eichin 10mo agoI'm sure you meant the code was changing periodically, but now I'm expecting some pseudo-cyberpunk "rapidly spinning barcode" authenticator to show up in a movie...
- lotsofpulp 10mo agoEvery retail business has a “priority” of preventing theft. When profit margins are 2%, it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.
- Zigurd 10mo agoTurnover dominates margins as a factor in physical retail profitability.
- vlovich123 10mo agoa) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities) B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.
- hnlmorg 10mo agoThe markup is around 30% or higher on each item (or at least that was the case back when I last studied business) I get there are overheads but that’s spread across all products and supermarkets have a lot of products. So you’d still have to have a lot of theft in a supermarket before you get close to a dent in those 2% margins. Edit: as an aside, this is also why high value items such as alcohol are usually at the back of the store. It’s easier to identify and catch someone stealing if they’ve attempted to conceal a product for the entirely length of the shop.
- mikkupikku 10mo ago[flagged]
- hnlmorg 10mo agoThat’s not even remotely what I was saying. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ——— My point is that shop lifting is small scale compared to legal sales. So for a supermarket to make a loss from shoplifting, they’d either have to see a significant jump in items stolen. This doesn’t mean that I condone theft; it just means I’ve ran the operating costs and margins for running retail stores and thought I’d share that insight.
- sieep 10mo agoI have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
- pavel_lishin 10mo agoI remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc. And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
- Loughla 10mo agoThat definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon. About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
- bombcar 10mo agoYep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening. If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con. Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
- technothrasher 10mo agoIn a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me. The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
- dole 10mo agoIn 2012, Target operated a "couple of forensics labs" and at least 23 "investigations centers" for surveillance. OP's article kinda sugarcoats it. Since it's been verified Home Depot does checkout facial recognition and builds profiles, silly to think most any other major retailer wouldn't. https://privacysos.org/blog/target-is-really-really-into-surveillance/ https://privacysos.org/blog/target-is-really-really-into-sur...
- echelon 10mo agoAI will probably automate this. I predict a new class of machine learning model that will ingest a large number of low resolution video frames and dump high resolution facial reconstructions. This stuff will probably be sold to both private and public sectors.
- euroderf 10mo agoDemocratising the Mission Impossible fake face technique.
- ceejayoz 10mo agoIronically, probably helping minorities at the same time. https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machine-learning-tool-pulse-stylegan-obama-bias https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
- djoldman 10mo agoProbably not in Illinois! https://www.aclu-il.org/en/campaigns/biometric-information-privacy-act-bipa https://www.aclu-il.org/en/campaigns/biometric-information-p...
- odie5533 10mo agoHow much forensic-grade surveillance profiling is an acceptable amount while I peruse deodorants and potato chips?
- Avshalom 10mo agoYou can't peruse the deodorant, we have it locked up.
- crises-luff-6b 10mo ago[dead]
- barbazoo 10mo agoIt's just so obvious at this point to see the wealth building up on one side and the technology that is necessary to protect it and wealth completely disappearing on the other, making people steal the deodorant in the first place. I can't believe there isn't a society or couldn't be one where all this shenanigans isn't necessary.
- red-iron-pine 10mo agothere is. but you'll probably have to force the issue.
- cm2012 10mo agoThis is why Target self check out is the best. They have confidence in their theft deterrence so their machine has a lot of leeway and yells at me less for weight issues.
- odie5533 10mo agoHow much do they pay you to work as a cashier there?
- rtkwe 10mo agoIt's impossible to prove or falsify of course but lower cost to them from having to pay fewer cashiers in theory shows up for the customers in lower prices. The other benefit is self checkout usually crams more lanes into a smaller area so you can checkout more quickly than waiting for the 2 lanes at best I'd often see staffed outside of peak seasons before self checkout.
- immibis 10mo agoThere has never been any instance of a company passing on cost savings to its customers unless forced by market competition.
- bluGill 10mo agoSince WalMart and dollar stores compete in the same space to some extent they have competition. And most things you buy at target can be bought from smaller specialty stores that while not direct competition between them all you have same same variety of things available. (and different prices and quality levels so you can make your own trade offs)
- rtkwe 10mo agoSo do big box retailers and grocery stores not have any competition then? I don't want to be snarky but it's not exactly a mono or even duopoly space in most towns for grocery stores and big box retailers are more often single choices in medium and smaller towns but above that you've often got a choice of big box retailers to go to too.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agopeople are reading this article misunderstanding that its purpose is to discourage theft by getting nerds to constantly talk about Target this, felony theft that, not by actually being effective at a technical level
- euroderf 10mo agoCan't someone juice this conversation with some false/misleading advice for retailers, so that after it goes thru an A.I., the A.I.'s advice for retail operations makes shoplifting and employee theft easy and simple ?
- crises-luff-6b 10mo ago[dead]
- reify 10mo agolooks like the lowly shoplifter is going to bring down capitalism. All that theft! no more profits. fuck me. All major businesses have insurance to cover all losses from internal and external theft. Those same lossses are tax right-offs. in other words, the amount of money lost to shoplifting is less money they pay in tax. I wonder of all the cctv, facial recognition and monitoring costs work out more than the actual shoplifted losses. there is more to meet the eye than a lowly shoplifter here.
- loeg 10mo ago[flagged]
- bombcar 10mo agoNo, they've solved everything! It's all magically covered by insurance so if we just all steal everything from Walmart we can be infinitely rich and it doesn't hurt anyone or cost anything!
- wtcactus 10mo agoThis reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry’s broken video player in the mail to claim the postal service broke it and get money for it. “It’s a write off Jerry. It costs them nothing. They just write it off!” Of course that Kramer also didn’t had any idea of what a “write off” was. He was also just throwing words around to justify theft.
- loeg 10mo ago"Huston"? This does not bode well for the writing/editing process at whatever site this is.
- dylan604 10mo agoNot quite phonetically, but spelled as pronounced? I'd assume we're talking about Space City in Texas vs the street in NY pronounced like a house that weighs a ton.
- loeg 10mo agoDefinitely talking about Houston.
- jollyllama 10mo agoWe have a problem.
- dang 10mo ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." (Typos / spelling mistakes certainly fit this category) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- loeg 10mo agoIt's not tangential; it speaks to the editorial process or lack thereof at this publication that they couldn't catch a misspelling of a major American city. It casts the entire article in doubt.
- dang 10mo agoIt never feels tangential, and I'm not saying your point isn't a good one! It's just that if you zoom out far enough, it's obviously not the topic, and this sort of subthread has a way of attracting more attention (and therefore upvotes) than discussion that's about the topic and genuinely curious. Here's my favorite way of explicating that guideline: it's not that these things aren't annoying—they are annoying! That's why people make posts like this and upvote them. It's just that, at a global level, they aren't optimal for what we're, er, optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Hence that guideline.
- alangibson 10mo agoIt's funny to see Reddit posts driving HN posts. There was a viral post about a rather video friendly lady getting politely arrested for shoplifting at Target going around today. A surprising number of people commented about how Target had made sure they got long sentences by waiting and recording them until they would get serious charges.
- Operyl 10mo agoTarget does tend to build cases, up to a certain point, so as to not waste LE time. But it’s not as much as people tend to think. If you steal a candy bar or a loaf of bread it’s just not worth it, but more? A TV? Yes.
- Avshalom 10mo agoSpecifically they wait until it's enough to charge with felony theft.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- carverauto 10mo agoso does walmart, have had one for a long time
- OptionOfT 10mo agoWhen I moved to the USA I always thought it was interesting in how many ways you can just walk out a store without paying. I'm from Belgium, and at least where I grew up at, the stores are much more corralled. One way in, one way out. But this forensics is also why I don't use self-checkout. Not that I steal stuff, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I forgot to scan something and get in trouble. I've had it happen to me that something was missed at Costco, you just walk back and pay.
- iamnothere 10mo agoDo Belgian fire codes not mandate multiple exits? One problem I have sometimes seen here is people running out of a fire exit, even if they set off an alarm in the process. And you can’t block or lock those exits.
- bj85 10mo agoTFA is a just a poor summary of an improperly cited 2009 forbes article. A somewhat recent article with additional information here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-target-tgt-police-surveilled-black-neighbors-in-inner-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...
- hackable_sand 10mo agoFriendly reminder that Target is still on the boycott list.