The article doesn't make clear whether they turned the system off because it wasn't working due to masks, or simply wasn't doing what they meant it to do in the first place.
> “This decision was in part based on a larger industry conversation,” the company told Reuters in a statement, adding that “other large technology companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technology’s utility.”
Will it come back when the masks go away, or have they realized that it was never useful in the first place?
(They also claim it had nothing to do with race, which is kind of farcical since it's well known these recognition systems have trouble with race. It obviously has something to do with race, even if they're choosing to ignore that issue.)
In brief, my questions are these: Can these systems track the movements of people wearing masks? (I suspect they can, perhaps with some tweaking.) And assuming that these systems can provide accurate movement data through the store, does analysis of that movement data actually provide actionable suggestions of how to arrange the store that, when put to the test, actually increase sales? (I suspect the efficacy of this analysis is greatly overstated by those selling it, and stores are beginning to realize this.)
