Pokémon card stores in Japan are adding facial recognition to stop people breaking their purchasing rules
Pokémon card retailers in Japan are deploying facial recognition technology to enforce purchasing limits, identifying customers who attempt to circumvent store rules around buying quantities of cards.
Why this matters: A store using facial recognition to catch people buying too many Pokémon cards is still a store building a biometric database of its customers. The problem is not the rule — limits on purchases are reasonable. The problem is the tool. Facial recognition means your face gets logged, matched, and stored every time you walk in. That is a permanent record tied to your body, used to police a retail policy. Once that infrastructure exists, the question is always what else it gets used for, and who controls the data.
Who should care: Lawyers · Compliance · Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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