Destroying trust with a doctored photo

Grocery stores are feeling like airports these days, with more of the work being downloaded to the customer.

Time was when paid staff checked through your groceries. They packed the bags for you and there was even a parcel pickup service, saving you from lugging the bags out yourself.

Now there are more self-checkouts than staffed cashiers. You do your own swiping, weighing, packing and lugging the bags, like you have to at airports.

And you don’t get a discount for your free labour, either.

In fact, you get whacked with skyrocketing prices due to inflation. Canadian food costs have shot up more than 20 per cent since 2020.

So news this week that a major grocery chain is setting up a security system of detention and receipt scanning brought to mind airport security.

Loblaw, the company that owns the Atlantic Superstores, is testing the new system at several outlets in Ontario.

People who use self-checkouts are being asked to scan their receipts after they’ve checked their groceries. If they don’t scan the receipt, barriers prevent them from leaving the store.

If they push the gate to get out, an alarm is triggered.

This ups the ante on the personal receipt checks, which were happening last year at Loblaw and raising the hackles of customers who said it made them feel like criminals.

Retailers say they need to increase security to combat shoplifting, which is happening at self-checkouts. Loblaw attributes much of this theft to organized retail crime.

But if this scanning test proves successful, all shoppers at Loblaw will be subject to suspicion and locked in the store until they scan.

If someone has no receipt because they didn’t buy anything, they will have to call security to be released.

This kind of security and surveillance is understandable at airports, which are dealing with threats of terrorism, importation of illegal substances and other crime.

But at a grocery store? For people picking up milk, eggs and a few fresh vegetables?

Retailers do not have the legal authority of Canada Border Services or the RCMP. They have no right to detain customers for using selfcheckout. They only have the right to conduct checks if they have witnessed a customer stealing something.

Stores like Costco have been receipt checking for years, but they are within their rights because customers are members and have consented to this in the contract they signed when they joined.

Shoppers at Loblaw have not signed a contract consenting to checks. They do not deserve to be treated like suspects or criminals.

Retailers refer to this type of activity as “loss prevention.” Since the introduction of self-checkouts, stores are dealing with increased theft. If someone doesn’t scan an item, for example, they don’t pay for it.

According to an international study, self-checkouts accounted for 23 per cent of retail losses.

So it turns out that the technology that was going to save them all that money is now costing them. It would be interesting to know if the losses exceed the savings. Wouldn’t that be ironic? That isn’t to say anyone should support theft. Maybe there are organized syndicates running operations to defraud retailers using self-checkout schemes. If so, investigate that without making everyone a suspect.

Or better yet, rethink the introduction of self-checkouts. If they removed them altogether they might end up saving money from shoplifting.

Sure, they’ll have to pay someone at the staffed checkout, but it might be more cost-effective than elaborate technology that tramps on people’s rights.

The receipt scanning and detention activities of Loblaw are still in the testing phase and haven’t been adopted countrywide. If they do roll out the program, I’m sure we will see court challenges from people arguing against detaining customers without cause.

This isn’t going to help the reputation of big grocery chains like Loblaw that are making big profits when many customers are struggling.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a photo released publicly Sunday and killed within hours by international news agencies may have launched a thousand conspiracy theories. Worse, it has shaken the public trust at a time when people need something to believe in.

The family photo of the Princess of Wales and her three children was posted to social media by Kensington Palace with a message claiming the image had been taken by Prince William.

Later that day, Getty, Reuters, the Associated Press and AFP removed the photo from circulation, stating it did not meet their editorial standards.

On Monday, Kensington Palace posted a message signed C, indicating it was from Kate, reading, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

Some reacting to the controversy wonder how releasing this photoshopped photo to the public is any different than the Instagram-filtered or Ai-assisted images found across the internet.

Photographs for marketing, advertising or art, however, have different standards than news photos.

“As for image manipulation, what image isn’t ‘photoshopped’ these days?” Mark Sheldon, a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, asked during a 2020 interview for the society.

“Everyone uses Photoshop or the iphone equivalent of it. Even in the darkroom, we would manipulate images.”

(Interestingly, a member and patron of the Royal Photographic Society happens to be Kate, the Princess of Wales, herself.)

The difference between a Tiktok influencer’s makeup tutorial, say, and news photography is that the latter is selling credibility.

In these times when the words “fake news” are bandied about by people who are more apt to believe a wild conspiracy on Facebook than they are scientifically backed advice from their local health authority, being precise about the who, what, where, why and how something happened is more important than ever.

That was the crux of the matter for Reuters, whose picture editors said when they noticed inconsistencies in how the image lined up that they could not immediately verify how, why or by whom the photo manipulation occurred.

According to Reuters’ Handbook of Journalism, its photo editors only use Photoshop sparingly, to crop and size photos, or balance the tone and colour. This is a journalism industry standard.

Cropping out a random bystander is acceptable. Inserting a person who it can’t be confirmed was even there is akin to defrauding readers. We’re not saying that’s what happened in this case, but neither do we have proof what part of that image is real.

News photos, and journalism in general, have a duty to record the truth. As journalists, if we can’t verify where something came from, we should say so. If we get it wrong, we should issue a correction and/or kill the item in question.

In the case of the Royal Family photo, all was not picture perfect.