LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 134 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

2023 LPRC Kickoff was a huge success with a sold out event! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the activities and review of the NRF Big Show from everyone’s perspective, a continued discussion on the planning of LPRC Integrate, the new IOS update and its implications, and a look at the newest data breaches out there! Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 134 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series, and I'm joined by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, fire producer Diego Rodriguez, associate producer Wilson Gabarino, and today we're going to talk with you all about a few topics. Again, as we mentioned before, back from the National Retail Federation's annual big show, a lot of interaction, engagement with all the right types of people. A lot of loss prevention, asset protection practitioners, law enforcement practitioners.

We were up there with all types of tech designers and influencers and beyond in the retail industry, all working toward the same thing to create safer, more profitable, and more exciting venues to shop in and ways to continue to enable our society to grow and go and up our lifestyles and everything else. So the productivity and these things are critical for us. And so what we'll do is kind of highlight a little bit about what all happened there as we go around the room. I want to take a couple minutes to also talk about updating on the LPRC, of course. We've got our, now that we've completed our kickoff conference, as mentioned, I think we're about at 100 people in the room for kickoff. Very exciting. We actually had to institute a wait list, something that's pretty new for LPRC. We've tried to always find venues to accommodate all our members.

But as we grow and as our members continue to engage even more across the six events and in our working groups and so on, we're now having to make sure that we can accommodate all the engagement. So very exciting. A lot of discussions around the upcoming LPRC Integrate program, what we're going to be trying to accomplish with this program, where that's going to hopefully lead us. A little bit about our Board of Advisors meeting coming up on the 22nd of February. That's what we call Ignite as we light the way for the 2023 season at LPRC.

We'll be going through the key issues as far as growth and success management, our strategy and our visioning sessions that we're getting ready to conduct here. Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we need to get there? And get the feedback from our members in different perspectives, our team members here, of course, our board of advisors and beyond. We'll also be hosting our LPRC Innovate program, our advisory panel, our partners, the 30 retail companies who contribute one or more of their innovators in the AP space primarily, contribute one or more of their innovators in the AP space primarily, as well as 11 right now at this point and growing solution partners that are involved in driving and members of the advisory

panel. They also, as we've talked about before, provide the resources for the LPRC to grow our research and innovation team. And because of funding that's come from our innovate partners, we've now been able to add an additional research scientist and our research technologist. So that's giving us the bandwidth, the capability to do more, to do more professionally, to do more quickly, turn around even more projects and so forth. So we'll be going through with both the board of advisors and the Innovate advisory panel where they want us to go, how we get there, what are the gaps and opportunities, how do we close those gaps and reach those opportunities and leverage their expertise, their energy, their ideas, their contacts and connections that they've got

in their efforts as well as ours. So we're looking forward to that. The Integrate program again is coming together. Now, just closing in on about 50 technologies will be involved in this first event to learn how to again, conduct this type of fairly complex but highly realistic scenario while integrating the tech stack together in all different forms, the sensors, the connections, the analytics, the dispersal, and informative information that we need out there. So that all is underway.

We're also now talking with the potential evaluators where we'd like to have one evaluator for each red, white, and blue team to help us get better, help them get better together, how to learn these types of things. training and so on in North Florida. And they're advising us, the University of Florida Police Department and others that are very familiar with running tabletops and war games. We feel like we're going to do a fairly good job. We have hopefully a professor we'll announce later from University College London, who has been involved in planning and executing major, major tabletops and war games in Europe, from Spain through the UK, to help us as well. So with no further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you could take it away. Thank you, Reid, for all those great updates. This week, I also want to focus on the NRF Big Show.

And as I said in my article summarizing the event itself, which I'm actually going to talk about in this update this week, it really did not disappoint. I summarized a post or a social media post during the week, which went viral. And that post was, that's a wrap. during the week, which went viral. And that post was, that's a wrap. First, I started with an inspiring retail ROI Super Saturday. It was followed by an astounding number of customer meetings or retailer meetings. I also attended a roaring 20s rethink retail top 100 influencers party. I hosted the NRF Loss Prevention Council. I was there and kicked off and was the marshal at arms of the Loss Prevention Research Council initial meeting at Bloomingdale's. I was named the top 10 NRF original Twitter. And during the week on LinkedIn there were 45,000 plus impressions and my engagements went up more than 100%. I walked nearly

90,000 steps. I also launched multiple technologies for prosecutor in the RFID space and I did my usual trend spotting for this article that I'm actually highlighting today. And most of all, and what was important to me, lots of new friends and past friends. It was great to get together. It was really, really an outstanding NRF 2023. So in my article, I listed two big hits and two misses from NRF 2023. The first big hit to me is the retail ROI Super Saturday. It's really the hidden secret, maybe not so hidden. Each Saturday, just prior to the NRF big show, retailers, industry analysts, and solution providers gathered in New York for this unique

conference. It's a fast-paced full day of both emotionally filled updates and stories from the Retail Orphan Initiative and also the latest insight in terms of what's happening to the retail industry. This year, it was held at the Microsoft offices near Times Square. There were over 220 executives that came together, and they raised over $380,000 to help vulnerable children and orphans around the world. children and orphans around the world. Since 2010, Retail ROI has funded 281 projects in 28 countries from grants of over $4 million, helping an estimated 311,000 vulnerable children. The great thing is you also pick up some really great data. There was lots of presentations and panels.

There was one on customer experience, one on the future of retail, and also the latest update on the hot technologies going into 2023. For example, they listed RFID, and they stated that in 2022, those already using RFID had 83% higher sales growth and 80% higher profit growth. So interesting data and really supports what I've been saying for a while that inventory visibility is critical to retail success going forward across channels and RFID helps but you can also use robotics and computer vision. but you can also use robotics and computer vision.

Hit number two is really the NRF itself as the showcase of retail innovation. As I said at the beginning, transponding is my favorite sport at NRF. And if you analyze it this year, the keyword that came out or the buzzword, the big word was artificial intelligence or AI. It was everywhere in the exhibits and the presentation. And it actually supports what NRF predicted, that in 2023, AI will shift from singles to doubles to home runs. Also interesting at this NRF that Silicon Valley has much greater competition. Both France and Israel had larger contingents attending. In the innovation lab,

you could also find a bunch of other countries. Both the innovation lab and the startup zones were great locations for technology inspiration. And I tried to spend time in each, but I ran out of time. There was so much to do. The buzzwords in the booths abounded. So lots of, again, AI was big,

but there's also a lot of things being smarter, more intelligent, integrated or connected, which I know is an important topic for LPRC, and everything is moving to real time. The cloud services company were there in full force, so Amazon Web Services was there and they actually had a much better booth this year. They were showing their Just Walk Out Amazon Go technology. They were also showing their Amazon Dash smart card, both of which helped with frictionless retail. Interesting this year, I also spent some time in Alibaba. And in fact, in the article,

you'll see a picture of me in the Alibaba booth. As I said, pre-COVID, if you wanted to understand where retail was going, China was a place to look at. And Alibaba really was one of the leaders in the innovation at that time. COVID has slowed that down. Digital technologies are improving everywhere. In the Verizon business booth, I actually had a hologram done on me, and it was amazing how clear it was. And again, I encourage you to see it. It's on LinkedIn. It's amazing how far that technology has come. As I said in the post that I did in social media, I called it beam me up retail, beam me up retail. And it's interesting the possibility from holograms in terms of customer service, help desk, and even with our dreadful video meetings that we all had. The number of

sensors available in retail is also expanding. This includes, of course, RFID I mentioned earlier, but electronic shelf labels were also popular. Computer vision were in different places on the floor and also mentioned in presentations. I also had some time to spend with one of the members of the LPSC who mentioned that their AI technology is now deployed in 80,000 plus self-checkout lanes. Carts are getting smarter. There was lots of smart carts with screens on them, but in my view, we're not moving fast enough. Of interest to me, especially for the Loss Prevention Foundation, Loss Prevention Council and Foundation, is that the importance of loss prevention is increasing. So it's great to see that David Johnston has been appointed as the new NRF Vice President

of Assess Protection and Retail Operations, especially when you consider the following, which I mentioned in the article in the November earnings call, Target CEO reported 400 million loss due to inventory shrink and organized retail crime, and that same team came up in other calls. And according to the NRS own research, eight in 10 retailers surveyed report that violence and aggression associated with organized retail crime incidents increased in the past year. I also had the pleasure of hosting 25 plus loss prevention executives on Tuesday night for the NRF Loss Prevention Council and top of mind was innovation, which is good news

for the Loss Prevention Research Council. And I also enjoyed, of course, being with you and blooming there. That was a great meeting and really enjoyed seeing everyone. So let me close this section in terms of what IHL Group said were the top technology that are most important for 2023. And this was presented both at Retail ROI and also at the Big Show. So their top five are geolocation, electronic shelf label, ways for stores, mobile checkout, and better mobile tools for store associates. The support cast required for success that retail winners are already focused on using includes RFID, edge computing, microservices,

extended mobile communication to places like the parking lot, and updating point of sale. And finally, in closing, there are two misses that I think could have had a lot more exposure. I urge you all to go see what those two misses are in my article. I will not go into details here, but the two big misses are live streaming and retail media. You can read about it all, again, in my article that's on LinkedIn and also on my website, TonyDeNorfia.com. So, in closing, lots of positive retail innovation leadership lessons from this NRF 2023. Lots of rekindled friendships were especially and they were especially positive because I think we've been apart too long. Outstanding parties and dinners and why a reminder that being in person is actually a great thing.

So thank you for this. And let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reed. This is our first taping after the NRF Big Show and thought I would start with that. The kind of common theme from my perspective was the digitization of the physical store. This was one of the first years I really really felt like the Big Show had a focus on shrink and asset protection. There were a lot of events driven around asset protection and there was an, what I would say, an overwhelming kind of approach of where even if the technology was designed for a CPG technology, consumer product goods technology, or pricing technology, or shelf technology, that certainly was customer first, but there was talk about the impact it could have on shrink.

So I thought that was a big win. Certainly the coming of age of machine learning was very relevant. And in the forefront, I think for the last several years, we saw artificial intelligence as at times a marketing buzzword. But this year I felt like there were a little bit more focused on what machine learning could actually bring to the end user as the customer as well as the end user as the retailer. So really thought it was great. The crowd was engaging, a tremendous amount of foot traffic.

I think I walked around 25 miles in the two days that I was there. I would say that I had numerous meetings and it was good to see you all, as well as it was great to see Tony and Reed in person at the LPRC kickoff meeting, which I think rounds out the week really well. It's an annual meeting at Bloomingdale's to just really talk about what the LPRC is working on. And it was a packed room. I think it was oversold. So it was a very, very good, interesting show for sure. And, you know, I think that what it really shows is the importance of people getting back together in person. And We talk about that all the time, but certainly we saw that in the real world as the show was just jam-packed.

I want to switch gears and just cover a couple stories that are in the news. One meta, the parent company of Facebook, is actually just won one lawsuit and started a lawsuit against a company called Voyager had, you know, created fake accounts, 38,000 fake accounts to collect information from more than 600,000 Facebook users. And this is that gray area where the violation of law versus violation of terms of services or misappropriation. So we often talk about here the importance of making sure that if we use any of these tools for investigation purposes that we have permission or guidance from our legal departments, regardless of whether you're a

public or private organization, it's very, very important to understand what the ramifications are of potentially violating a company's terms of services or stepping too far outside. Basically, what this is, the 38,000 fake accounts were used to create a web and connect with people and then scrape data. This is not a new technology. And by any standpoint, I think it's just metas. The parent company Facebook is going after this and saying you're taking advantage of the terms of service. And, you know, again, I don't even say it's walking the line. You're clearly violating terms of service by opening and creating a fake account. take a glance at what your social media practices are in investigations and just make sure that you're partnering with your legal partners to make sure that what you're doing doesn't violate any laws. Apple released iOS 16.3, which is the first version to support hardware security keys.

I think this is the coming of age where this is going to change kind of the way we work to prevent phishing attacks and other types of attacks where this is, you know, really taking the next level of hardware or near field communication from a Mac or a MacBook to take that next layer of protection. I think we've talked about two-factor authentication so many times here, but this really adds another layer of complexity where the devices have to be near each other. This kind of takes away some of the unknowns that occur.

And then I think just in breach conversations, we talk about breach or cyber instances. Norton's LifeLock, One Identity Protection Service, had disclosed that they had a cyber incident where information was lost. I think it's still too new to know exactly what has occurred. I think at this stage, we're still investigating. But this is kind of along the lines of you have a company that manages passwords with a potential cyber incident. I think in this case they were—I don't think Norton itself had the actual loss. I think it had to do with this isn't actually a breach. And it sounds as if this was really more people's accounts

being accessed because of the repetitive passwords. Credential surfing is what it's also sometimes called, where someone's using your credentials and going throughout different web services and trying to get in. So I think this is one of those ones where the news implies that this is a breach, but it really is more of a hack that sounds like it occurred from people misusing passwords and reusing it, unlike the last pass, which was an actual breach and cyber incident on their side.

So more to come on that. As of right now, it sounds like that, it sounds more to me that the information was purchased on the dark web passwords of other people, and then someone went ahead and went after it. And we continuously say that the importance of using individual passwords and not repurposing passwords and using two-factor where you can. I think this is never going to go away. We continue to talk about that.

And then last, I think there's a lot of conversation. There was some around the big show about augmented reality and virtual reality. Again, this goes back to the meta announced some of the meta announcements where they're signed a pretty large deal. Facebook meta for the metaverse signed a pretty large deal with the end, the women's NBA and some other sports organizations to actually sell virtual apparel on the metaverse. But it really talks about kind of where that situation is going. Another kind of secured related news is that Meta is mentioned that they will use end-to-end encryption in messaging throughout the metaverse. So really

continuing down that path of where augmented and virtual reality is going to go, I think at the Big Show there was a of where augmented and virtual reality is going to go. I think at the big show, there was a lot more augmented and virtual reality than I've seen in the past, as well as hologram technology. So I think as we continue to go down this technology path, we will continue to see this trend. And I think it's too premature to know where it will end. And with that, I will turn it back over to Tony and Reed. All right. Well, thanks so much, Tom. Thanks so much, Tony, for all that great information.

I know that Wilson, that also Kim, but Diego on our team are working to support us to look at ways that we're going to start to bring in criminology guests. We're going to bring to bring in criminology guests. We're going to bring in LPAP practitioner guests. We're going to bring in our Innovate Advisory Panel partners to discuss what they're doing to help us shape innovation at the LPRC and what their role in that is. We're also going to be doing some short interviews with some of the tech partners in the upcoming integrate scenario and those that will be coming after that to learn again their role in helping us put together and execute unprecedented learning experiences for all of us as we deal with increasing crime and violence. So stay in touch. I want to thank all of you all for staying in touch with us. Stay tuned for more from Gainesville, Florida. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information

at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.