A New York family-owned grocery chain investing in eyes/voice/face biometric collection infrastructure just for shoplifting prevention doesn’t quite add up economically.
It reminds me how IBM pushed license plate reader technology onto NYC bridges in 1966.
Wegmans launched facial recognition in October 2024 at its Brooklyn Navy Yard location, initially claiming it would delete data from non-consenting shoppers. It’s a notable claim given a $400,000 settlement with New York’s Attorney General over a data breach exposing 3 million consumers.
It’s also notable given the FTC’s 2023 Rite Aid enforcement action, revealing the chain used facial recognition in “hundreds of stores” from 2012-2020, generating “thousands of false-positive matches” that disproportionately flagged women and people of color. Rite Aid received a five-year facial recognition ban and was required to delete both images and algorithms developed from collected data.
By 2025, the Wegmans program expanded to all NYC stores with a critical policy change: signage now indicates collection of eyes/voice/face data from all shoppers, and the promise to delete non-participant data was removed.
Wegmans’ privacy policy still claims biometric collection is “limited to facial recognition information”, contradicting the new in-store signs that say eyes/voice/face; a large discrepancy the company has not explained.
The opacity of Wegmans’ specific arrangements—refusing to disclose its vendor, data retention policies, or law enforcement sharing practices—suggests awareness that basic levels of transparency might reveal uncomfortable interdependencies of a growing data extraction and centralization economy that shifts costs to taxpayers (through grants and policing partnerships), shares risks across industry consortiums, and potentially opens future monetization pathways.
Wegmans’ own privacy policy states:
We may provide Security Information to law enforcement for investigations, to prevent fraud, or for safety and security purposes.
Think twice about the real price. At Wegmans, it’s bananas how they capture and sell you.