Wegmans and Macy’s Expand Facial Recognition in NYC as Oversight Runs on Trust

Retailers’ rising use of facial recognition highlights a growing gap between technological capability and legal oversight, raising thorny questions for privacy and commerce in New York City.

On a recent weekday at the Fairway on the Upper West Side, a sign no bigger than a page from a spiral notebook quietly warned: “This store collects biometric data.” Few customers, transfixed by produce or price tags, even noticed the cue that their faces might soon join digital queues anchored somewhere in New Jersey or beyond. Wegmans, the upstate grocery juggernaut now opening branches in Brooklyn and beyond, is merely the latest retailer to embrace facial recognition. Its expansion has reignited a simmering debate: are these technologies making New Yorkers safer or simply more surveilled?

The facts speak to a broader trend. Biometric surveillance once evoked airports or post-9/11 security fears. Now, the technology rides shopping trolleys beside customers, tracking repeat offenders—and, potentially, regular patrons. A flurry of national chains still denies deploying such methods publicly. Macy’s admits to using facial recognition at some city locations; Burlington, Target, and CVS insist they do not. Yet lawmakers, shoppers and privacy advocates reckon that the technology’s prevalence far exceeds official disclosures.

Retailers tout facial recognition as a response to what they describe as an epidemic of “shrinkage”—a politer euphemism for theft. New York’s post-pandemic spike in retail crime cost local shops a paltry $4 billion last year, up from $3.4 billion before lockdowns, and grocers in particular report a rise in coordinated shoplifting. For them, the argument is simple: technology can keep stores profitable and staff safe. But the cost is less easily measured—privacy seems an oddly dispensable tender.

Synthetic intelligence matches faces against databases of known shoplifters, employees, or banned customers. The system, its operators claim, is not infallible but “highly accurate.” What it seldom is, however, is transparent. Under a city law passed in 2021, stores collecting biometrics must post signs and may not sell the data. Yet the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection concedes it cannot enforce this regulation; the only check is a customer’s own ability to sue. Unsurprisingly, the true compliance rate remains opaque.

For ordinary New Yorkers, many of whom have never knowingly read a biometric notice in their lives, the sense of being watched is at once invisible and unsettling. Darrell West, a Brookings Institution fellow, notes that “there’s no justification for keeping your face on record for months and months.” No one yet knows who audits these digital ledgers, how often data leaks occur, or what happens if algorithms err. Shoppers in one Upper West Side market expressed near-universal ignorance—and dismay—when told their faces might be on file.

The technology, evolving faster than regulation, bodes ill for clear redress. If stores err—wrongly barring a loyal shopper or misidentifying a visitor—recourse is muddled and legalistic. Enforcement by private lawsuit hardly offers the proactive oversight that sensitive biometric systems demand. While the city bars companies from profiting off facial data, it offers little guidance on what “profit” means in the age of big data, nor how long companies may securely store faces before purging them.

The broader implications for New York are puny in some respects, outsized in others. On the one hand, facial recognition will not single-handedly reverse dwindling bottom lines for stricken retailers, nor will a few dozen biometric scanners restore Gotham’s reputation for safe shopping. Yet the technology’s silent spread chips away at a cherished urban norm: the freedom to move through public—and semi-public—spaces anonymously. For a city already bristling with CCTV, the notion that every bag of groceries might come with a portrait in a retail database is unlikely to cheer consumers.

Unmatched by law: When technology leaves regulation lagging

New York’s predicament is hardly unique. In San Francisco, facial recognition is outright banned for police and city agencies, while Illinois compels companies to win written consent before collecting biometrics—a constraint that has netted hefty settlements from recalcitrant firms. Yet nationwide, regulation is piecemeal at best. As retailers deploy ever-nimbler surveillance in pursuit of security, customers find themselves with paltry recourse and scant transparency about precisely what data is gathered, shared, or—perhaps most ominously—misused.

Globally, the ledgers hardly balance. The European Union, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), imposes severe restrictions. China, meanwhile, encourages surveillance on an industrial scale, prioritizing “social stability” above individual privacy. The United States, as is often the case, muddles through, leaving much to local ordinances and tort law. New Yorkers thus find themselves in a peculiar limbo: their faces may be more valuable to grocers than to government agencies.

Politically, the issue is ripe for demagoguery but short on consensus. While the left bemoans a surveillance dystopia, the right invokes rampant theft, and business lobbies insist neither side appreciates the buccaneering creativity of shoplifters. Yet all sides agree on this: when software quietly tracks every nose and brow in the dairy aisle, the city owes its citizens more clarity on exactly what is happening, to whom, and for how long.

We suspect this misalignment between technical prowess and legal safeguards will not endure indefinitely. New Yorkers’ skepticism, unlike many transient policy panics, is buoyant and broadly shared. Retailers seeking allegiance in a fiercely competitive city would do well to remember that trust is a scarcer commodity than blueberries in January. Left unchecked, the quiet proliferation of facial recognition risks both lawsuits and a deeper erosion of civic trust.

Innovation has long been New York’s calling card—not always to immediate applause, nor often accompanied by ready-made rules. Yet if retailers wish to preserve the delicate compact between commerce and civic life, they would be wise to treat facial recognition not as a panacea for petty theft, but as a tool to be handled with transparency, caution, and, above all, restraint. The city can ill afford to become the Big Brother Apple by accident, nor can it blithely sacrifice privacy for the sake of keeping shelves stocked.

New Yorkers are, by and large, pragmatic: they like convenience and abhor waste, but bridle at unseen waste of another sort—the slow, silent leakage of civil liberties for paltry returns. With regulators on the back foot and technology racing ahead, the gap between what is possible and what is prudent yawns ever wider. If the city does not wish to cede its privacy debate to grocers and algorithms, the time for clearer rules—and brighter signage—is now. ■