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
In a complaint filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on 19 December 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission alleged that the pharmacy chain Rite Aid used facial recognition in its stores to match customers against a database of people it suspected of shoplifting or other wrongdoing, and that staff acted on the match alerts by following, searching, ejecting and publicly accusing customers and by calling the police. The FTC says 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 employees called the police on a Black woman matched to an image of a white woman with blonde hair. Rite Aid agreed to a proposed order barring it from using facial recognition in retail stores for five years, without admitting or denying the allegations.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026