A major pharmacy chain in the United States has landed in hot water for its "reckless" use of facial recognition technology, which resulted in thousands of customers being wrongfully accused of shoplifting.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has banned Rite Aid from using facial surveillance systems in stores or online for the next five years - the first time the US regulator has ordered any entity to stop using facial recognition.
Rite Aid started secretly using the system in 2012 to identify customers who may have been shoplifting or engaging in other undesirable behaviour.
However, the dodgy tech - which relied on a database of low-quality images - generated thousands of false positives, with Black and Asian customers more likely than white customers to be misidentified as people who had shoplifted.
The false alerts led to Rite Aid employees - who weren't informed the system could make mistakes - publicly accusing the "shoplifters", searching them, ordering them to leave, and/or calling the police.
The FTC said Rite Aid's use of the systems "left its customers facing humiliation and other harms...and put consumers' sensitive information at risk".
The pharmacy group, which is currently in bankruptcy proceedings, said the program was only used in a few stores and discontinued in 2020, and said it was "pleased to reach an agreement with the FTC and put this matter behind us".
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