US: FTC says Rite Aid's facial recognition falsely matched shoppers to a watchlist, leading staff to search an 11-year-old girl and call police on a woman

The system. According to the FTC complaint, Rite Aid used facial recognition in stores, mostly in and around New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlantic City, Seattle, Portland, Wilmington and Sacramento, to compare people entering a store with images of people it had deemed likely to shoplift, sending match alerts to employees.

The alleged harm. The FTC alleges that employees acted on match alerts by following customers, ordering them to leave, preventing purchases including prescribed medication, searching them, accusing them publicly of shoplifting and calling the police, and that many alerts were false positives. Employees recorded thousands of false-positive alerts between December 2019 and July 2020. Staff stopped and searched an 11-year-old girl on a false match, and her mother told Rite Aid she missed work because her daughter was so distraught. In another incident the system matched a Black woman to an enrollment image that employees described as showing a white woman with blonde hair; employees called the police and asked her to leave before realising the alert was false. Customers complained of humiliation and stigmatisation.

The FTC's account of the causes. The complaint says Rite Aid did not test the technology's accuracy, did not enforce image quality standards for enrollment images, did not train or oversee the employees who acted on alerts, and that Black, Asian, Latino and women customers were especially likely to be harmed.

Outcome. Rite Aid agreed to a proposed order barring it for five years from using facial recognition or analysis systems in retail stores, and neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

The FTC alleges that false facial-recognition matches led Rite Aid staff to search, eject, publicly accuse and call police on customers, including an 11-year-old girl who was searched and a Black woman on whom police were called; customers described humiliation and stigmatisation.

The FTC filed its complaint in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on 19 December 2023 together with a proposed stipulated order, signed by Rite Aid in December 2023, under which Rite Aid would be prohibited for five years from using facial recognition or analysis systems in retail stores. Rite Aid neither admitted nor denied the allegations. Court entry of the order was not inspected.