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.
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.
It does seem like an easy way to do this is just get your buddy to shine a laser pointer at the camera while you grab the stuff.
Any given shelf is generally visible by like 6-8 cameras.
Oh, I see. That's fucked. Over here stores have like...3 cameras total? Giver or take? Positioned in a way that multiple aisles are covered by a single camera. We don't really have a lot of fearmongering about shoplifting though.
It's not really about shoplifting, the cameras are a core component of the system, and if they could use fewer they would. Say what you will about the concept, but the cameras themselves aren't really the insidious part, in my opinion.
I'm assuming these cameras all have to be wired, right? If they were wifi, a concentrated deauth attack could take the whole store down.
Yeah they're wired, larger grocery stores were kind of a problem because they need up to like 10gbps connection, which is pretty abnormal for a grocery store. Because yes, almost all of the video is processed in the cloud, although they are trying to shift more of it to processing on devices in the stores.