Pokémon Stores Implementing Facial Recognition to Combat Scalpers

The Pokémon Company announced that they've implemented mandatory facial recognition in Japanese Pokémon stores to combat card scalpers.

Pokémon in its card form is a collectible card game in which you purchase card packs to build your deck. You don't know what you're getting when you buy a card pack.

Because Pokémon cards are so popular right now, scalpers will buy up an entire store's stock and sell them at a marked up price in order to make a profit. More daring individuals resort to stealing them outright for an even greater profit.

It's apparently become such a problem that some drastic new privacy-invasive measures are being implemented.

The facial recognition system will reportedly enforce a limit of one entry per day for each customer. Those subject to face scans are all adults and even all children down to elementary school age. According to a translation of the original page by PC Gamer:

If the system detects that the same person has entered the store more than once in one day or received more than one entry ticket, and a notification (alert) to that effect is displayed on the screen, entry will be denied to that person based on the system's judgement.

There's no option to opt-out of the system. The Pokémon Company promises that the data won't be held indefinitely but they seem to be scant on the exact timeline.

Previously, the company was caught in a scandal where it was revealed they had been using Pokémon Go camera and GPS data to train AI models which were then used for delivery robots to navigate to their destination. Niantic, the studio behind Pokemon go, even bragged about how much data they were collecting:

Each of those images comes with detailed metadata that pinpoints where in space the phone was at the time it captured the image, including which way the phone was facing, which way up it was, whether or not it was moving, how fast and in which direction, and more.

With a track record like that, I would have a hard time trusting their word about the privacy of such a system.

While cities have been cancelling their contracts with surveillance companies like Flock, private companies don't have to answer to the public the same way elected officials do. It's more likely they'll listen to a boycott, since it affects their sales are the most important thing to them.