Served and Surveilled

A few months ago, my former Eater coworker Luke Fortney wrote a great New York Times story headlined “Dinner is being recorded, whether you like it or not,” thanks to Meta glasses in restaurants. Surveillance tech in hospitality is something increasingly unavoidable and hard to opt out of before you even set foot in a dining room, down to the way reservation booking platforms and delivery apps track customer behavior. 

It also extends to our grocery aisles. Remember Wegmans’ comforting statement that it was only collecting facial recognition data “to identify individuals who have been previously flagged for misconduct?” And the Consumer Reports investigation from last year that found that Instacart used AI (what’s considered dynamic pricing) to inflate grocery item prices by as much as 23 percent? After the findings were made public, Instacart announced that it would end the program.