LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 21 – The Future of Privacy – Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest Peter Trepp (FaceFirst)

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

In this special LPRC Crimescience: The Weekly Review episode, Peter Trepp, CEO & President of FaceFirst, joins us to give his take on the future of privacy, delving into expectations of privacy, legislation, security, technologies, and more. In addition, co-hosts Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio discuss upcoming LPRC collaborative initiatives, the recent Jacob Blake incident, digital risk protection, Microsoft’s Zero Trust security, ransomware, D&D’s crime report, and the global retail data. Peter Trepp is a technology executive, investor, advisor, and thought leader.  He is currently the CEO of FaceFirst, a recognized leader in the facial recognition market that provides AI-enabled identity solutions to commercial and government organizations around the world. Peter has nearly $1B of exits in his career having helped numerous software companies achieve successful exits as a co-founder, executive and board member including CSC’s acquisition of ServiceMesh, BlackLine’s sale to Silver Lake Sumeru, and RedHat’s acquisition of Inktank. Peter’s thought leadership on AI, technology, and matters of privacy have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, WIRED Magazine, CNBC, New York Times, Forbes and elsewhere.  He is working with Senators on Capitol Hill to help craft upcoming legislation on facial recognition and works closely with numerous Fortune 100 companies to develop corporate privacy policies.  Peter is widely regarded as an expert on privacy and is the author of the book, “The New Rules of Consumer Privacy”. Peter earned his MBA at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and BS degree in Economics from UC Irvine. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 21 – The Future of Privacy – Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest Peter Trepp (FaceFirst) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's in the world at large around what's going on in asset protection, loss prevention in particular, but with the influence, of course, of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as sporadic but widespread and periodic looting or other threats to the retailer and their customers and their employees in ways that we might better understand and affect for the good. So we'll go ahead and talk a little bit about, of course, COVID-19, what's going on there as we race into the fall of 2020. You know, the idea, the concern even that not only will we have COVID-19, but we'll

have one or more widespread influenza strains. It will be interesting. My understanding is that Australia, which is sort of a sentinel because of the way the season works in the southern versus northern hemisphere, they've had a relatively mild flu season, if you will. Of course, sheltering in place, reducing the spread of COVID evidently does the same as one would expect for influenza strains. But despite that, there are trivalent and quadrivalent flu vaccines available and with a lot of recommendation around that. Simultaneous with that or separate,

but separate, is some new research findings, rigorous, peer-reviewed, that the influenza vaccine, as well as several others, tend to look to be somewhat neuroprotective. In other words, might protect those of us that receive these vaccines from different brain issues, including, though, different forms of dementia. So that could be a good another good reason to consider vaccination of yourselves and loved ones from the different viruses that abound, as well as some of the newer antibacterial vaccines that are out there. They may have neuroprotective components to them or effects, which is actually pretty exciting. Again, part of the concern out there before was just getting testing done to understand who has COVID-19 and who doesn't. Where is it going next, who might be near somebody that's infected that is infectious, and so on. And so remember, that's part of what's going on is trying

to understand the difference between a person that's infected and then when they're infectious, or there's some infectivity. And so that's a big part of the science that's happening. And that's a lot that's going into testing, understanding while someone may be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, the virus being, of course, SARS-CoV-2, now they've got it. There's some RNA. There's maybe even replication or not. But is that individual shedding that virus? Are they viremic or infectious? So, and try and understand how that happens. Superspreaders have been something that emerged through this pandemic. A lot of research going into understanding that, that, you know,

why do some people have these incredibly heavy loads of virus they've onboarded, incredibly heavy loads of virus they've onboarded, but they are not projecting any clinical symptoms, but they are infectious. And so, you know, we've seen at choir practices, at family reunions, at weddings, at funerals, and other events where people are clustered together, nobody appeared to be invisibly sick, maybe in any way, shape, or form, but yet several dozens or almost everybody is infected at that event because that super shedder is heavily dosing the area. They're hosing the area down with virus. So more to come on that and trying to understand some of the exciting things. Again, now there are several coming out or already licensed or approved anyway by the FDA tests that take just a little over 30 minutes for turnaround time. And so they're trying to understand too the best way to, you know,

if we've got a saliva or we've got different types of testing. Of course, the nasal and even higher up in that passageway, they're going to find maybe more viral load. The test is more likely to be a for real positive, not a false positive or preclude a false negative because you didn't get enough viral activity that you picked up on. The other, some other exciting things that now there are four-way type test panels, at least at that point of care, as they call it in the hospital or sometimes in the physician's offices, it's going to be readily available, hopefully soon, that would test simultaneously for somebody that's symptomatic, seems like they're sick, to determine is it a one type, A type flu or a B type flu? Is it COVID-19? Is it RSV, another somewhat common respiratory virus that's particularly serious for very young and very old?

So you can imagine now that physician is able to get a 36-minute response and understand that this person who's now masked up or has been masked up, what in the world they've got, and not make false diagnoses. It's also going to help with understanding the spread of any and all the viruses that we've got. We always talk about on this podcast some of the updates, not only on testing, of course, but on therapies and then, of course, on vaccines. The therapies, they continue. We know that there are several different programs underway, but CTAP is the U.S. government FDA's program, which is designed, of course, to move therapies along quickly, treatments, and it's the Corona Treatment Acceleration Program, CTAP. As of August now, we've got over 570 in approved testing stages.

We've got another 270 that are some initial trials look like it's a safe protocol or, excuse me, a safe therapy. Now it's going into actual trials. So these have been reviewed by the FDA, over 270 registered trials with therapies to treatments we know that are approved. So that's the front there. Some of the therapies that are kind of interesting out there, there's one that's an anti-clonal antibody test. It's in a phase three in some parts of the world, phase two, three in other parts of the world. But it looks very positive. And we've talked about some of these therapies like vaccines are designed to affect the virus or the cells that have been infected or the other parts of the immune system.

been infected or the other parts of the immune system. And we know that there are these B cells and T cells and different antibodies and so on that are in a part of our innate and adaptive immune system. So these things, some of these are looking pretty exciting. We anxiously await the results of those as we move through all the testing there. On the vaccine front, continually making movement there also, where a couple more have moved in, I understand, into phase three trials. We've now got seven vaccines and large-scale efficacy tests or trials. Many of these trials are taking place in countries or areas that are total hotspots since we really need to have those that are dosed with the actual agent versus those that are not, that are probably got some sort of saline or other placebo to see how effective they are at either

precluding infection or probably even more likely though that it's a very, very mild infection if you even get it. So we've got 139 right now. It looks like they're preclinical research. 25 vaccines in phase one, 15 in phase two, and again, seven in phase three. So a lot going on right now. And just trying to understand a little bit about the virus. There's now been some of the, even though there's certainly not a postmortem here, but trying to understand the dynamics of the spread in China, throughout China, and how it moved around the different parts of the world.

In the United States, we know that this is somewhat politically charged as well. But I think the scientists, the physician scientists that are taking a look at this are talking about, well, why did it spread and spread so rapidly? We know that it's a virus that's very highly transmissible, of course, has uneven effects. But we also know that, you know, again, there are these super spreaders and others that are out there moving around. And so part of the response by the CDC and at the state and county level, the county level is traditionally where public health happens. That's where you go. Your county health department is trying to keep everybody healthy and respond to outbreaks and so

on. And so it's understood right now, it looks like the CDC at all, the normal model is, well, whatever we do here, and we've got a couple of vaccines, some new testing, some things we want to start looking at, but we can start getting tests out pretty quickly to the public health centers, particularly and mostly at the county level. That turned out to be a huge problem because, first of all, we know some of the reagents that they had, some of those didn't function at first. They quickly remedied that. But the problem was the public health departments were completely and totally swamped because of the very high transmissibility of the disease. So the other part of this is that the private reference labs that are the big labs that can handle a lot, that can handle huge surges pretty quickly, had developed their test kits themselves. They were ready to go into action, but the normal regulations were in place. And the regulatory hurdles for them compared to a public health who says, hey, I can come up with my own test. I can do it fairly quickly and start administering it. They could do those things, but they couldn't handle the crowd.

The private reference labs could, but they couldn't get in the game. And it took a long time. It took weeks and weeks and a couple months to let them into the game. Once that happened, now you started seeing huge ramp-ups in the testing. And then now some of the – now these 36-minute tests and things like that. The other problem the United States evidently had was this almost simultaneous east and west spread. It looked like it was coming in people who traveled from China into Seattle, and it was going exponentially from there. But at the same time, people were coming in from China

or other areas that had been infected, like Italy, into the east coast, and it was spreading. So you had this massive simultaneous introduction of the virus in the United States that spread very rapidly. And you're now fighting a two-front war that's now coming internally, flights are coming in. I think the administration suspended flights from China in late January, but that was by that time too late. So, and again, the fourth component they identify as to why the response wasn't adequate was just the asymptomatic spread, the super spreaders that were not anticipated

and weren't really evidently known by most virologists or a lot of the infectious disease physicians, so epidemiologists. So that's kind of a look back at what happened in the United States in the face of that, of COVID-19. I know now switching gears over to what we're looking at, we've seen in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a flare up where I guess an individual was being arrested and law enforcement officers, one of them evidently shot a black male subject, an African-American. He was hit in the back. I understand investigations, of course, are ongoing at the

local, state, and federal level to understand. But in the meantime, again, what started out as peaceful demonstrations evidently very rapidly escalated. So there's been widespread looting and burning and assaults taking place there with citizens trying to protect their businesses or others and so on. So we'll stay tuned. But at LPRC, we're standing by and talking to retailers that are operating there. Again, like in most of these riots that have gotten out of hand, the local business owners have been taking the brunt of the burning and looting. And so we know that that's a terrible side effect there. Looking at crime and COVID, we're going to do an update at LPRC. You're going to see one thing that we're going to do is we're having three cluster calls

for the LPRC solution partners. We'll replicate these for the retailers coming up. But the first one we held was on LPRC Innovate, how Innovate works, how we do innovation and option testing, how we can leverage the virtual reality platform, and then the different technology we have to visualize places without everybody having to go there, but do some pretty good testing. And so we had, I think, over 36 technology companies rung in and were able to engage with our team on understanding LPRC, Innovate, the four research and development clusters that are going on there with connected community, connected place or store, smart transactions, and safe and secure

experience. And then, of course, discussing AI Solve, the AI leveraging to support those four initiatives. And they also got brief sheets sent to them. We've got about 78 technology companies that are members at the LPRC. So we want to do everything we can to support them. Another thing we've done with them is that's coming up where we want to discover, we want to discuss crime and COVID, understand the routine activity approach from Felsen and his work. And we heavily leverage that, but understanding how COVID dramatically reduced the amount of street and commercial crime targets for offenders and dramatically reducing those targets. At the same time, we reduced some of the protection like

police guardianship and passerby guardianship, and of course, law enforcement guardianship. But just the fact that the target selection was stripped pretty bare seemed to account for the dramatic reduction in property crime across the United States, even though now we're seeing property crime re-approach the same pre-COVID levels, while violence, particularly homicide in certain cities we've seen have almost gone to unprecedented levels now as targets are much more readily available, both commercial and personal targets. So looking at those dynamics. So we're calling it Pandemic Panorama. Dr. Corey Lowe, LPRC research scientist, will be working with our solution partner members on that call called Pandemic Panorama. We'll then later have an impact planning call by Kenna,

who is our research team leader here. Her and Jesse Dudley and Kevin Tran will be discussing impact, how solution partners can get involved, should get involved, what they can do to engage and support LPRC, but engage and work with the other members, particularly retailers. Other LPRC news, we're full on with working with the University of Florida students on their senior projects again. We're full on with working with University of Florida students on their senior projects again. We've got UXD or user experience design, which is human centered computing. They're computer science students who are amazing. And they work on one of the clusters. They'll divide into teams and work on connected place, work on connected community, smart transaction, and so on. Smart transaction

can be curbside, in-store, mobile, other self-checkout or standard. And so they will break down and come back with really innovative solutions and ideas that they've done, put together by doing some research. The same thing with ISC, industrial and systems engineering. Those students, they look at things differently than the computer science students, which is exciting and rich for us. And then finally, the innovation academy students, where you can get a minor in innovation at UF across over 32 majors. And so they have these interdisciplinary teams that also work on the same problem. So we get a lot of perspective from the students and their faculty across that. Looking forward to the now to the LPRC Knowledge Center, we're continually uploading the working group calls, the results of those calls as well. We don't record our working group calls to maintain confidentiality for every participant in there so they can participate, engage,

and share and ask questions or answer them freely with each other. But the call notes are in there about the findings and the projects that they are working on. For members, if you get in the Knowledge Center, we continue to upload video clips of interviewed offenders, more reports from us and research reports from others around the world. The landing pages at lpresearch.org also are being updated by Kevin and team. So a lot going on as we prepare for impact that first week in October. We're excited, two-day program. We'll do a special crime science episode talking about and going through that with Kenna and Kevin and discuss what that looks like and how anybody can get engaged. We've got over 400 participants already registered, which is a record number.

We normally have 400 in person, so it's going to be interesting to see how many we get over the next weeks and weeks registered for this two-day virtual event. over the next weeks and weeks registered for this two-day virtual event. So that's a little bit about what we think is going on and what we're trying to do about it to support the green shopper, the green employee, the person that we want to spend time there. And so with no further ado, if I might, let me go over to my colleague and friend, Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, over to you. Thank you very much, Reid.

It's really my great pleasure to introduce our special guest for today. Peter Trapp is a technology executive, investor, advisor, and thought leader. He's currently a CEO of FaceFirst, a recognized leader in the facial recognition market that provides AI-enabled identity solutions. Peter has nearly $1 billion in exits in his career, having helped numerous software companies achieve successful exits as co-founder, executive, and board member. Peter's total leadership on AI, technology, and matters of privacy have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, New York Times, Forbes, and Matters of Privacy, have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC,

New York Times, Forbes, and elsewhere. He's working with senators on Capitol Hill to craft upcoming official recognition legislation and works closely with numerous Fortune 100 companies to develop corporate private policies. Peter is widely regarded as an expert on privacy and is the author of the book, The New Rules of Consumer Privacy. So, Peter, welcome. Tony, thank you very much for that kind introduction. I appreciate that. Delighted to be here and really appreciate the invitation. Appreciate the invitation. You know, I wanted to speak for a few minutes about privacy and about this topic that is so personal and so meaningful to all of us. And I know 2020 is filled with lots and lots of big issues.

You know, Reid just very nicely covered one of them there. But, you know, there are a lot of big issues. And privacy is on that list, I think. And I think it's going to continue to be for some time here. And the reason is it has a lot to do with a pretty major shift in digital transformation that's going on right now. And so if you think for a moment about what your own expectation for privacy is, you know, it's a really interesting question to think about. And what I've learned is all of us have oftentimes very different expectations for privacy. And if you ask people, hey, is privacy protected under the law?

I think most people think it is. And questions rise about, well, what law exactly? There are local laws. There are law exactly? There are local laws. There are state laws. There are federal laws, and one's being considered right now. Illinois, as some of you may be aware, has one of the most stringent laws out there on the books, BIPA, that's been famously attested here lately. But there is no law of the land today. here lately. But there is no law of the land today. And there are a lot of questions about it and a lot of people working on it. But again, because people have different expectations,

it's going to take some time before we really zero in on what the laws ought to look like and what they ought to do. And two very high-level ways to think about that is, is it enough for me to get a notification that somebody is collecting information about me? Maybe in certain circumstances, maybe not. Is it better or should it be required that I be notified when and if somebody is collecting information on me? So those are the kinds of things that are right at the core of this discussion. And because we're on this threshold of digital transformation, and it's going to be very much fueled by AI that we've sort of been talking about,

but are just beginning to see some of the results. Everything we do at home, at work, when we go shopping or go into a bank or whatever we decide to do is going to be increasingly governed. We're going to see a digital interface, a way for businesses to know who we are better, to present our identity in a more secure way. And we can see elements of this when we look at our online experiences. So you think about logging into Amazon or an online shopping experience, and you think about all the information they have about you, right? Right from the beginning, they know who you are, they know what your shopping history is, they know your gender, they know your zip code, there's lots of information they know about you. But today, by and large, you walk into a brick and mortar store and they don't know that

you're even there. And that's not the experience that is possible. And it's not the experience that I believe most retailers want. What does that look like? How do we do that so it doesn't feel creepy, but provides a benefit? We've seen Hollywood movies, Blade Runner and these futuristic films that predict what that might look like. And you're going to get varying degrees of agreement on whether that's right or not. But you could imagine. And I think it's going to be a slow transition in some ways. But this year, things are speeding up pretty rapidly as well. side, those things are all going to go through a pretty major shift with this transformation into a digital relationship with our businesses. And so there are two ways to kind of think about this world, because it's not only just about the shopping, it's also about security. And

securities are very important. We've started to see some of the crime numbers, but we haven't seen them all yet. And they are certainly increasing. And some of the biometric and digital solutions are very effective at helping to reduce organized retail crime and violent crime and mitigate fraud and some of these things. Very, very effective tools and great arguments for having those. But some of the laws and the lawmakers are targeting some of those tools because these are use cases where people are not opting in. And so we're going to have to, you know, we're going to visit this issue and revisit this issue for months to come. But many of the other

use cases where we have opted in, and maybe there's an app involved, and maybe there's a personalized menu, and you walk into a store and they now know you, that is going to be an opt-in experience. And that really is not the target of these laws. We already opt into all kinds of use cases. So what's next? We're seeing Clearview AI out there is getting a lot of press these days. They've hired a gentleman named Floyd Abrams, who is a First Amendment, very, very prominent First Amendment attorney who is bringing these privacy arguments to the First Amendment side of the debate. And we'll have to see how that plays out.

It's a very interesting way to think about it, for sure. Congress and some pretty high profile senators are proposing some legislation right now to talk about privacy and how facial recognition and other biometric tools are going to get used. Their initial introduction was pretty radical, but that might get watered down a little bit, and we'll probably see that come back around. At the end of the day, I think, and just in conclusion, I think success comes when everybody is involved and knowledgeable. So that's users, that's businesses, and that's legislators. The technology is always going to lead legislation. Legislation follows the technology. So you're going to see cutting-edge ideas and solutions.

But when everyone understands what's going on and has a hand in that, we're going to see the most effective deployment of this technology. I will leave it there. Again, thank you very, very much for inviting me here today. I'm going to hand it now over to Tom and appreciate your time. Thank you, Peter. and appreciate your time. Thank you, Peter. Always interesting to listen to you talk and read the book and I recommend everybody going out

and grabbing a copy. So I'm going to go into kind of just a quick overview of some of the things that are going on. One thing, and I am intentionally repetitive here, is just a reminder that although it isn't consistent throughout the United States,

kids are going back to school either remotely or in a hybrid fashion. And you have, unfortunately, a group of folks that are targeting children to get into accounts and compromise data as well as some other nefarious actions. So it's a good reminder to just enhance your cybersecurity habits, have conversations with your children about sharing personal information, making sure that they're not sharing passwords, pictures. There's actually some really scary statistics of attacks directed at schools and children right now. There was a warning issued last week again by the FBI really talking about the risk for businesses because your entry point on your home network or computer could be your child. So for instance, which in some cases isn't that easy,

your work computer should not be used as your child's school computer. And if you try to keep those two segregated, that's kind of a big one to work through. So one thing I want to talk about, and Peter touched on this, and I know Reed did, and I know that Tony will as well, is digital risk protection and what it means for asset protection professionals. And I think when you hear digital risk, you think cyber right away, you think of those things. But digital risk protection is not just about cyber, it's about how you protect yourself as a retailer or a consumer in this enhanced digital transformation. So retailers are increasing their digital footprint more today than they have been in the past and COVID's accelerated this. So that actually widens the landscape of attack. And this isn't your typical cyber attack. This is

digital risk protection is very tactical in nature, making sure that your access to your actual hardware and your locations is secured and then monitoring after the crime. The threat landscape is really any digital device or digital footprint or data that you have. So as asset protection professionals listening, I think in the next six to eight months, you're going to see that line blurred dramatically, and we should start to see things around digital risk protection. Certainly with the civil unrest, we're doing a lot more in the social media listening and open source intelligence gathering. And that's actually kind of the first forefront

into digital risk protection. Digital risk protection is just as much about the company's brand and image as it is of the actual intellectual property or asset. So I encourage you to start looking at some research. I did a couple virtual conferences, recordings over the last two weeks, and digital risk protection was a huge topic, and it was really centered around taking your open source intelligence gathering program to the next level around brand. I think it's important to note that with all of the events that are going on globally, when you take into consideration COVID-19 and then you take in civil unrest and you

take in an election, you have to really be vigilant to not forget to really make sure everything is buttoned up and digital risk protection is while we're distracted is when hackers come in and really run through. Microsoft released kind of a very interesting document around the pandemic and how it's changing the future of cybersecurity. They talk a lot about a zero trust environment. And I think I mentioned it often on this podcast, probably even every time we do a podcast, but I want to make sure I clarify a little bit. So zero trust is cybersecurity focused on resource protection and the premise that never to grant implicit access. never, never to grant implicit access. So it's kind of this ecosystem where you're saying test everything, double check everything and continue to evaluate it. I think retail was a little bit

farther ahead of the curve because of the breach implications that retailers had pre-COVID. But I think in general, everybody has to be in the zero trust journey or transitioning to a zero trust environment because we are in a position where our digital resources are remote and mobile. And they were before. And I would argue that they were really moving that way, but not to the level of what it is. So today, you have to start with the assumption that there's going to be a challenge, not just granting access, and then continuously evaluating it. So I thought it was important to really talk through that because I constantly talk about zero trust, but never really went into that.

In light of the growth of remote work, more than half of the business leaders are speeding up the deployment of the zero trust capabilities. That's according to Microsoft. And then 94% of the corporations they talked about in this study reported that the process of deploying zero trust capabilities is rapidly accelerated. And really, that's everything from physical hardware to software down to policy. that's everything from physical hardware to software down to policy. I know just based on what I do day to day that that is happening rapidly in retail as retailers open up. But again, it's reminded that you couldn't take more things going on today globally to distract you and you add the weather elements of the season and it really becomes challenging. Cyber security, you know, is more important during COVID-19 than it has ever been.

MIT did a report in the MST Business School really addressing to continuously, and we talk about this on the podcast all the time, look out for cyber-related scams. Look for those emails that are trying to steal information. Hackers are really becoming a little bit more creative. I know early on in the podcast, we reported very early on some of the COVID maps being infected with malicious code. And then you had a lot of attempts at ransomware attacks around COVID-19. So it's just, it continues to be a challenge. And there are two really, really nasty ransomware – it's actually three, but two major ones that are going on right now.

encrypts your files so that you can't access them. And then a hacker or a bad actor comes to you and wants to be paid to unload those files or to give them back to you. And I know we talked about some of this, but it's continuously rising. And now with COVID, there's a lot around COVID. And then work from home vulnerabilities continue to be a challenge. I don't know if anybody caught the news about video conferencing, and there was a school where a teacher saw a gun in the background. We talked about privacy, and they rightfully reported it. You know, I believe that, you know, there was a child. It was not a, it was a BB gun. Of course, it went into other things, but it just, it serves as a reminder of that when you're at home and you are, you know, using video conferencing, you just have to take, you know, the extra special step to

understand what is on that video and what's the implications it may have. It doesn't really matter where you stand on what the issues are today. It's that you are, you are exposing yourself to a vulnerability when you're, when you are using other video conference softwares. And I think everybody thinks of the traditional vulnerability, but I read a news brief out of Miami where someone was doing a video conference at work and they had a large sum of money out. And then they were robbed the next day, and when they caught the person, it was a coworker. money out and then they were robbed the next day. And when they caught the person, it was a coworker. I mean, there are a lot of simple things that you don't think about when it's related to implications of working from home, but it's really taking that extra special step.

And what I would say is if you had someone in your living room, if you're comfortable with them sitting next to you, you're probably going to be comfortable with them on video where it runs through. And then something that consistently comes up and is not going away is fake products. Several websites selling masks, some not actually delivering it, some delivering masks that aren't there. So just doing your due diligence or where you run through and making sure that you're taking that extra special step before you place an order. And this applies to big business and personal sales. The big businesses are not exempt from this because

when there's a need for something, these folks take a really good amount of time to make sure that what the websites and their selling process looks legitimate. And then I already talked a lot about remote workforce. I think it serves as a reminder to remind your children and just take yourself that extra special step for yourself as well. And then I want to round out just because I got a lot of phone calls last week about social media monitoring. And someone had actually sent me a couple different videos, but there is a rash of social media chatter today around shoplifting policy in-store, hands-off, hands-on, and how to get around

shoplifting. And this could be organized retail crime element, but really these posts seem to be individual actors just looking at them, really talking about the store's policies, the police policy in the jurisdiction, as well as mask compliant and which way to wear the mask to have the least identifiable features. So as you continue to monitor for social media and open source intelligence for all the things out there, I think today – I think there was 154 different occurrences last week where there were people – last 10 days, sorry – speaking about specifics around policy in-store and even taking pictures of what types of cameras they used and actually pseudo-maps. So just a reminder to when you're looking at your social media monitoring programs to spice it up and change it a little bit. I think that there's not a one-size-fits-all, but certainly as stores open and continue to stay open, there is a lot of chatter around how folks can go in and take things. And also, I'll leave and turn this over to Tony with this, is there's also quite a bit

of chatter on refund policies. And some locations early on, or retailers, had stopped their returns or suspended returns. Well, there is a lot of chatter around who is taking refunds, who has changed their policy around refunds. I know there are a couple of retailers that, because they had stopped taking refunds and turned it back on, had changed some of their modeling around acceptance of refunds. And there is chatter about that. People are talking about it and talking about the ways to take advantage, just like everyone here is listening to the podcast and are parts of the LPRC. Unfortunately, the folks that are looking to take nefarious action in your stores are doing the same research and are having some of the conversations. And I'm sure some of them are listening to this podcast. And so when we think

through those things, just make sure that when we go back to that, rounding back to that digital risk protection, thinking of as many different points of vulnerability for you and kind of creating policy and education awareness around this. I will now turn it over to Tony. Thank you very much, Tom. And to wrap this up, before I turn over to Reid, let me just share some of the latest industry data. And I'll start with what we talked about a lot today, which is crime. So a new robbery crime report came out this week from D&D Daily covering the first half of the year. And so for the first half of the year, robberies are up 4% to over 2,800 in the United States. What's interesting in the second quarter of the year, they actually were down 5%. And that's interesting because that was primarily the lockdown phase.

The top three sectors being hit by robberies are convenience, restaurant, and jewelry. So far this year, 38% were armed, 37% were unarmed, and 25% were burglaries. The highest number of robberies, and I don't know why, but it's Monday. That's where they happen the most. The lowest is on Friday, so taking the rest before the weekend. 51% of the incidents occurred between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., and the top three states are California, Texas, and New York. The top three cities for robberies are Chicago, San Antonio, and Las Vegas for the United States for the first half of the year. I'm actually publishing a blog summarizing all the crime trends

for the first half of the year that will come out actually this week and will be made available. I'm going to switch now to what's happening to retail in general. There was some interesting research just published by CNBC in terms of what's happening to mall and non-mall retailers. So consumers with extra money are skipping the malls and shopping at big box retailers. About halfway through the fiscal year, mall-based retailers have seen their earnings plunge 256%. And when you compare that, the combined earnings of off-mall companies such as Home Depot,

Walmart, et cetera, they're only down 0.6%. So mall-based retailers, and this is actually a trend that's been continuing because mall-based retailers have underperformed their off-mall competitors in 19 of the last 20 quarters. And to give you an example of some of the big retailers they just announced recently, actually in the last week, their earnings here is, for example, Walmart. Walmart saw same-store sales up 9.3%. E-commerce sales were up 97%. The average ticket is up, although they're having less transaction. During the pandemic, they hired more than 400,000 hourly workers. And even Sam's Club memberships are dramatically up. They're up actually 60% in the quarter. So you think that

was good? You should have looked at Target. Target had a blowout quarter with same store sales up an amazing 24%. Their number of transactions are actually up and the average transaction is up even higher. Online sales grew an amazing 195%. And to give you an idea in terms of how important this thing called curbside retail is becoming, their curbside sales were up 700%. And for the first half of the year, Target gained around 10 million new digital customers. So think about that. In six months, they gained 10 million new digital customers on their platform. And then I'm going to wrap it up with Home Depot. Again, very, very tells you that we're all at home doing things.

Their profits are 25%. Same store sales are up 25%. And what's interesting is it's really more to the do-it-yourself, so the do-it-yourself for sales outpays those to other professionals. But keep in mind that all this growth, it is coming at a cost, and Home Depot actually pointed to some of it. They spent $480 million in additional compensation. And then another $110 million went towards safety costs. So they are spending money to actually get some of that growth

because of the pandemic. So it gives you an idea in terms of how retail is going and continues to grow, especially for what was classified as the essential retailers. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Reid. All right. Thank you so much, Tony, Tom, and Peter, for your incredible insights for all of us. And a lot going on, a lot's changing. I wanted to, again, reiterate, we talk about going back to Peter's discussion with us and you all around people and privacy and this VX or value exchange. And we heard a couple of examples of that value exchange. And we know if we've got an automobile, it's got a license tag. And whoever sees us or the tag knows who we are.

We've made that exchange. We can drive, so we're going to have ID, a driver's license. We're going to have tag on our vehicle and things like that, and we know if we're out there. So all of us should be aware, should have some concerns around privacy and how things are done and used and guarded and so forth. I can tell at LPRC our stance has been for a long time. Again, I'll remind the listeners, really our primary watchword here is safeguarding and we want to safeguard vulnerable people in places. And we always start and we try and work there and end there. But we know to do that properly or more, be, uh, better at doing that.

We need situational awareness and we need the awareness to, to become understanding, to make better decisions, to select the right protective options and things like that, to get more of the green shopper, uh, activity that we really need and want. Um, and, uh, the good workers, the associates, the team members that want to come there and feel safe and secure while they're there in the same way that our shoppers that we'd like. And all keeping in mind that what we do in asset protection, laws prevention, law enforcement is repel the red guy, the red person, the one that's there to victimize the people, victimize the places. That's what they do. They commit theft, fraud, and or intimidation and violence.

So that's what it's all about, is situational awareness and understanding to do that. And we know that when it comes to AI, how does that assist decision makers? Well, AI systems can provide additional information that the user, the decision maker, doesn't really have at their fingertips, isn't aware of, can't recall right there in the moment during that event. AI has immediate access to much more data than the user ever could. And so that's one reason that AI is so powerful now in helping physicians, radiologists, and others diagnose tumors, detect things much more quickly, accurately than traditional means to provide decision support information to them. We see that now with airline safety during flight operations where AI and other of these

other smart technologies are helping to do that to provide more information more rapidly to support the decision not make the actual decision and this is our second part of what we think about and try and incorporate here at LPRC in safeguarding vulnerable people in places and that is we think there are three distinct but connected components of computer vision human identification or their action recognition. We're working on that here on recognizing very harmful behaviors that can infect, intimidate others or harm them in other ways. But one is this positive ethical use of this decision support information and how we do that. But it's, again, to provide us a heads up.

There's some situational awareness about something and maybe start to inform so we have more understanding about what we need to do or what's happening before our eyes or that we need to at least deal with. that we need to at least deal with. So the model accuracy is important and that training data sets need to incorporate all the people that need to be recognized or should be contrast. So that's why you see model accuracy continues to improve and that the data sets are continuing to be expanded and improved in the same way that they help us make better prognostications about what's happening because the right behaviors or the right individual that's a potential threat to somebody, one of our people, is probably recognized. But again, it goes to the second part, and that is solely the AI, the models, the algorithms are there to provide support information. They don't make any actual decisions, but rather they inform the decision maker, again,

maybe providing them information they didn't have or couldn't recall in the moment or would never have. And so that's what it's about. The manager then has to decide to collect other information to maybe validate in the way that when I started out as a store detective at 18 years of age that I got a Polaroid photo of this person. That photo says it's this person I'm having to validate. Look, maybe ask somebody else, things like that. Then the manager, whoever the decision maker has to decide, what possible responses do I have? Ignore it, call for help, render good customer service or whatever is indicated here, evacuate the building, do whatever might be there if we've got a threat. But what are their responses? And then the manager then

decides whether to initiate one of those responses. And then finally, that AI just requires the use of it should have ongoing training would be the next point. So again, we want to have a positive ethical use logic model in place, like safeguarding vulnerable people in places or better serving the green shopper or a better experience for the employee, that the accuracy continues to improve and that we're trying continuously to do that by including the right targets and contrast behaviors or objects and things like that, that we're using it totally as an information support tool. And then the third part or the next big part that we think is different is now the data privacy. That's a separate issue, but yet it is, of course, connected. But the personal images of the known offenders or other threats, objects like a handgun or a knife, things like that, that we might be using AR to try and safeguard people.

But that data set is safeguarded and not as corruptible within the limits of current capability, data protection capability. So these things are all linked. They're all important in our opinion. But it's just like in medicine. We don't not do something that has good efficacy and supports that decision-making process. supports that decision-making process. We try and find ways to do it better, be more accurate, and to safeguard the data as much as we're trying to safeguard the individual. So I'll stop there and just say that it's a critical issue. Since the dawn of man, people have conducted surveillance in one way or another, looking for campfire smoke to whatever, trying

to recognize people. It's human nature to want to understand what's going on around us, that situational understanding. So with no further ado, I want to thank again, Peter, Tony, Tom, Kevin Tran, our producer. I want to thank all of you all and hope everybody stays safe. Contact us again at your convenience at lpresearch.org. We'd love to talk to you or at operations at lpresearch.org. Stay safe. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. 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.