Jul 2025IndiaPoshan Tracker face recognition
From 1 July 2025 India's Ministry of Women and Child Development made a facial recognition check in the government's Poshan Tracker app mandatory before pregnant women and nursing mothers receive take-home rations under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme; the app compares the woman's live face with her Aadhaar identity photograph. In July 2025 Decode reported from Delhi that a woman eight months pregnant returned to her Anganwadi centre for a third day trying to get the app to recognise her, and a worker said she gave food to a new mother the app would not recognise and recorded it by hand. In August 2025 the Karnataka Anganwadi workers' union told The South First that the faces of pregnant and nursing mothers change so they no longer match their registration images, and that some mothers leave without their rations. In March 2026 a Decode investigation supported by the Pulitzer Center reported that a mother in Jharkhand was cut off from supplementary nutrition ten weeks after giving birth because the software could not match her face to a photograph taken eight years earlier, that a pregnant woman in Bihar who was anaemic went four months without rations because the system could not match her to an older Aadhaar photograph, that one Bihar centre had removed three pregnant women and five nursing mothers whose faces no longer matched, and that a Jharkhand worker was told to remove at least four children whose eligibility depended on their mothers' failed face matches. Decode also reports failures earlier in the process, when women cannot receive a one-time password on an Aadhaar-linked phone. Government figures cited by Decode show 52.7% of eligible beneficiaries had received rations through facial recognition by 31 December 2025. A researcher who analysed the app for Decode found Google's ML Kit face-detection library in it; Google said ML Kit cannot recognise individuals, and the government has not disclosed who built the matching system. After workers' protests, a February 2026 app update let workers upload other identity documents for pregnant and nursing women, subject to a supervisor's approval. Decode reports the Bihar woman later gave birth to a healthy baby, while her name remained missing from the system.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 02/11/2026
Jan 2023MexicoCBP One app
In January 2023 US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made its CBP One mobile app the only way for migrants at the US-Mexico border to apply for asylum appointments and exemption from Title 42 restrictions; applicants had to upload a photo of themselves through the app. In February 2023 the Guardian and the Border Chronicle, both reporting by Melissa del Bosque, quoted three non-profits working with Haitian and African asylum seekers in Tijuana, Reynosa and Matamoros who said the app's facial recognition was failing to register many people with darker skin, so they could not upload their photos and obtain appointments. The executive director of Al Otro Lado said Haitians at a workshop her organisation held in Tijuana the day after the app went live got error after error message. The Sidewalk School said hardly anyone among about 4,000 Black asylum seekers in Reynosa and 1,000 Haitians in Matamoros was getting an appointment, and that shining construction lights on faces let adults get past the photo step but not children under six, which kept families from applying. A Haitian Bridge Alliance attorney said the app had helped lighter-skinned applicants but not Haitians. The advocates also described other barriers, such as outdated phones and poor internet access. CBP did not answer the Guardian's questions before publication and told the Border Chronicle no one was available to respond. No technical analysis of the failures is reported.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026
Mar 2021United StatesID.me Face Match
ID.me, an identity-verification company used by at least 21 US states to check people claiming unemployment benefits, asks claimants to pass a facial recognition step that compares their face with a photo of the same person, such as a driving licence. In June 2021 Motherboard (VICE) reported that a gig economy worker in Las Vegas was suddenly cut off from his unemployment benefits in late March after ID.me failed to identify him. He said that when he held his phone in the instructed position the system rejected him three times without giving a reason and then locked him out. He said he tried ID.me's chat support many times and the state of Nevada sent him back to ID.me; after several weeks he posted a public criticism on Twitter, and the company contacted him and, after several more days, verified his identity. He said he went three weeks without his benefit and could not pay bills. ID.me's chief executive told Motherboard that its Face Match algorithms operate at about 99.9% efficacy, that failures are a problem with how people use the system rather than the technology, and that the company was unaware of eligible people unable to verify their identity. Motherboard said other claimants in several states described similar lockouts; those accounts are not counted here.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 30/10/2026
30 Apr 2024BraziliFood facial recognition check
A delivery worker in Brazil's Federal District who had worked for the iFood app for about three years says he was banned from the platform in April 2024 shortly after completing the app's daily facial recognition check. iFood support told him another person had tried to access his account; when he asked to see that person's photos, they were his own. G1 reports that the only difference from his registration photo was his hair, which he was growing out. In a judgment reported in June 2025, a Brasília labour judge, applying a default because iFood had not filed a defence in time, accepted as true that the contract was suspended through iFood's fault, that he suffered financial and psychological losses, and that the facial recognition tool had a racist failure, and ordered iFood to pay R$60,000 in moral damages. iFood denies that its facial recognition procedure analyses racial characteristics and has appealed. The account was restored during the case. No appeal ruling has been reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 27/10/2026
23 Feb 2024United KingdomMetropolitan Police live facial recognition
On 23 February 2024 Shaun Thompson, a London community volunteer whom the 2026 judgment describes as 39, walked past a Metropolitan Police live facial recognition deployment near London Bridge station. The High Court records as not in dispute that the system detected a high level of facial similarity between images of him and the watchlist image of his brother, who was the subject of an outstanding arrest warrant, and generated an alert. According to the court's account, officers stopped, detained and questioned him and made him prove his identity, and when he declined to have his fingerprints taken he was threatened with arrest; he says the experience left him angry and distressed. Officers ended the engagement after checking police records about his brother, and he confirmed his identity with a passport photograph on his phone. Big Brother Watch, whose director was his co-claimant, says he was held for almost 30 minutes despite showing several identity documents. His judicial review claim about the stop, issued in May 2024, was withdrawn under a consent order agreed on 18 December 2024 on terms including a settlement sum paid to him. An amended challenge to the Met's revised live facial recognition policy of September 2024, brought with Big Brother Watch's director, was dismissed by the Divisional Court on 21 April 2026; the court said it was not judging the merits of the technology, and the claimants announced plans to appeal.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 26/10/2026
13 Apr 2024BrazilUnidentified facial recognition system
During the half-time interval of the Sergipe state football championship final at the Batistão stadium in Aracaju on 13 April 2024, military police took a personal trainer from the stands to a police room after the stadium's facial recognition system flagged him as a man with an open arrest warrant; he was searched and questioned and released once police confirmed he was not the person sought (G1, his lawyer and the military police). Sergipe's governor publicly regretted 'the failure of the facial recognition tool' and suspended its use until a new protocol was adopted. In June 2024 the man sued the state for 550,000 reais in moral damages; the state argued that the Aracaju municipality, not the state, had contracted the system. In December 2025 the judge rejected that preliminary objection, according to Mangue Jornalismo, which read the court file. No final judgment is reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/10/2026
Dec 2019 to Jul 2020United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
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.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 22/10/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified facial recognition system
Folha Vitória reported on 29 September 2026, citing the Espírito Santo Civil Police, that a 39-year-old man was arrested on 28 September on a preventive warrant after an inquiry into qualified theft by electronic fraud against an 81-year-old man in the north-west of the state. According to the police, the suspect, who worked as a security guard at a dance venue, invited the man to his home on the pretext of making a free-entry card, kept his bank card, obtained personal data and photographed his face. The police say he used the images to get past the facial recognition of the banking app and enable access to the account on his own phone, then reset security passwords, redeemed investments and made Pix transfers without the victim's knowledge, diverting R$6,080. The victim is described as illiterate. The police say the suspect had prior records and was serving a sentence under a progressive regime. Folha do ES and Tribuna Norte Leste carried the same police account but could not be read.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 07/10/2026
13 Aug 2026 to 8 Sept 2026United StatesSentinel AI (reported)
NorthJersey.com reported on 5 October 2026 that a former remote employee of Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, based in Clifton, New Jersey, sued the company in New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic City on 23 September 2026. According to the complaint as reported, the employer told the employee it would start monitoring her through her work laptop's webcam with software called Sentinel AI, which would use AI and facial recognition to confirm that she was the person at the desk, taking 160 still images in an eight-hour shift. The employee raised concerns in writing about the AI seeing inside her home and about whether the data would be securely stored, said the monitoring had increased her anxiety and stress and worsened a medical condition, and asked for a full or partial exemption as a reasonable accommodation. The suit says the request was denied, she was given a 24-hour ultimatum on 13 August 2026 to submit to the monitoring or resign, an offer to avoid the software by commuting to the office was rejected because it would require six hours of travel time, and her employment was terminated on 8 September 2026. The suit alleges that the employer violated New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws and retaliated against her for requesting reasonable accommodations. Sutherland did not respond to the outlet's requests for comment, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 06/10/2026
17 Sept 2023United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
Jason Killinger, a UPS truck driver, alleges in a federal civil-rights complaint filed in July 2025 that on 17 September 2023 the Peppermill Casino in Reno reported to police that its AI facial recognition software had identified him as a man barred from the casino months earlier. According to the complaint, casino security handcuffed him, and the responding Reno police officer, told the system had found a 100 percent match, did not examine his other identification and took him to jail as an unidentified person, where fingerprints confirmed who he was. The complaint says he was handcuffed for about four hours, starting in the casino security office, spent about eleven hours in police and jail custody, and was treated the next day for bruised wrists. According to the complaint, he was then charged with trespassing, and a prosecutor dismissed the charge without prejudice at the bench trial. Casino.org reports that he settled a suit against the casino. In March 2026 the court let him add the City of Reno and a municipal liability claim over facial recognition policies, but refused a new wrongful arrest claim against the officer on qualified immunity grounds. In September 2026 the ACLU, the ACLU of Nevada and the Innocence Project filed a proposed amicus brief supporting him. His September 2026 motion for partial summary judgment says a Reno police detective later concluded that the match was wrong and that he and the barred man were different people, and it cites a declaration by a former casino security officer, who worked there from about October 2024, that the system often alerted at 100 percent on the wrong people; in a declaration reported by Casino.org, the officer said he had never known the system to misidentify anyone. The case is ongoing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 9 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 04/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownFacebook video face-scan check
In a public post to r/facebook on 28 September 2026, a user writes that their five-year-old Facebook account was hit with a security check that asked for a video face scan, which 'failed completely'. They say their face had changed a lot through recent life circumstances and 'The AI simply didn't recognize me.' Facebook then asked for ID, and 'the automated system instantly rejected' their government ID because their profile uses a shortened nickname. The poster says they are locked out of years of memories, friends and active Marketplace listings and are looking for a way to reach a human or download their data. Meta has said that video selfies used to regain access to compromised accounts are compared with the account's profile pictures using facial recognition; whether this check worked that way is not known. The account is uncorroborated.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 29/09/2026
23 Jun 2021United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
According to police and bank records reviewed by the Washington Post, in December 2019 a woman made fraudulent withdrawals at a SunTrust branch in Potomac, Maryland; branches in two other Maryland counties were also defrauded. A bank investigator posted the surveillance photos on CrimeDex, an online network of police and corporate investigators; an unknown respondent ran the image through facial-recognition software and returned Kimberlee Williams's name and photo, and the investigator told Montgomery County police that facial-recognition software had identified her. Police in Montgomery, Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties charged her in 2020 on the investigator's identification and their own visual comparison of photos (two departments also cited her old Oklahoma check-fraud convictions), without reported checks of her whereabouts; Montgomery County police did not disclose the facial-recognition search in the charging application, according to police records reviewed by the Washington Post and the ACLU. On 23 June 2021 she was arrested at the gate of Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma, while accompanying her daughter on a DoorDash delivery, spent about three weeks in an Oklahoma jail, was flown to Maryland, and faced 16 charges including 12 felonies. The counties dismissed the charges one after another, in October and December 2021, after about six months in jail. Her daughter says she was depressed afterwards; the ACLU says the ordeal harmed her mental and physical health. On 14 April 2026 the ACLU and ACLU of Maryland sent complaint letters to the three departments seeking an apology and reforms.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 27/09/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified facial recognition system
The Espírito Santo Civil Police (Defa, the fraud and forgery unit) said a 27-year-old man was arrested on a warrant in Serra on 22 September 2026, suspected of defrauding a personal trainer of more than R$100,000. According to the police, the suspect offered a car in exchange for the victim's motorcycle; during the negotiation he persuaded the victim to perform a facial-recognition procedure, saying it was needed to transfer the car's ownership; the biometric was later used to contract a vehicle financing in the victim's name without his authorisation, and weeks after the exchange the victim discovered that the car he had received did not belong to the suspect and was a rental. The loss, combining the motorcycle and the fraudulently contracted financing, exceeded R$100,000. The suspect, who police say had been arrested in São Paulo in July 2025 in a 'love scam' case, was taken to the Centro de Triagem at the Rodrigo Figueiredo da Rosa prison complex and remains at the disposal of the courts. The financing provider and the facial-recognition system are not identified, and the reports do not say how the captured biometric was used to pass the financing.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/09/2026
14 Aug 2021 to 14 Mar 2024United StatesSt. Louis mugshot recognition (SMRT)
Christopher Gatlin was arrested on 14 August 2021 for an assault at the St. Charles Rock Road MetroLink station after a joint St. Louis County and city team uploaded a grainy, blurry surveillance photograph from a bus into the St. Louis Mugshot Recognition Technology System, a facial-recognition tool that searches stored mug shots (more than 500,000 uploaded, the suit says per the Post-Dispatch; more than 250,000 per Biometric Update via Hoodline), and built the investigation around the resulting match together with a witness identification; he was charged with first-degree assault and held roughly 17 months (the Post-Dispatch says almost two years), a county judge suppressed the witness identification as unconstitutionally suggestive, and prosecutors dismissed the charges on 14 March 2024 (Post-Dispatch; Hoodline citing Biometric Update; Bloomberg Law). Gatlin sued St. Louis County, the City of St. Louis and named officers in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri on 13 January 2025; on 15 October 2025 the court denied the city's motion to dismiss and granted a detective's motion only as to one count; on 13 August 2026 the court allowed a second amended complaint adding Amazon Web Services, which the complaint says supplied the Rekognition program the system used; the county, city and officers answered on 27 August 2026, AWS's response was extended to 21 September 2026 and on 17 September it moved for a further extension to 28 September (no ruling on the docket when read), and a jury trial is set for 1 November 2027 (CourtListener docket). Amazon told the Post-Dispatch that its terms of service prohibit the use of its facial recognition technology in criminal investigations and that it would fully investigate any information that emerges in the litigation. The ACLU lists Gatlin among fourteen people known to have been wrongfully arrested in the US because police relied on erroneous facial-recognition results.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 26/09/2026
24 Jul 2026 to 26 Jul 2026IndiaUnidentified facial recognition system
In an affidavit of 17 August 2026 before the Supreme Court of India, Delhi Police said its Facial Recognition System (FRS) had identified 2,873 people with criminal antecedents at the Jantar Mantar protests of 20 to 26 July 2026 (2,402 through its 'Crime Kundli' biometric database and 471 through other criminal records). On 1 September the Court quashed the FIRs against the student protesters but let the police proceed against the 2,873; the police say any action will follow field verification. The Indian Express checked the 205 listed people facing murder, attempted-murder, rape or child-sexual-offence charges against police, prison and court records and found that at least 25 of them (17 accused of murder, four of rape (two or three under POCSO; the Express's narrative and its list differ), four of attempted murder) were lodged in Delhi's Tihar, Mandoli or Rohini prisons when the system logged them at the protest site with timestamps on 24, 25 and 26 July; some had been in custody for years. Delhi Police told the newspaper that further verification of the 2,873 was pending and, in its affidavit, that no action is taken solely on a facial-recognition result and that field verification follows each match. The police disclosed in 2022, in reply to a Right to Information request, that it treats a match with an 80 per cent similarity score as positive. Whether any of the 25 has since been named in the fresh FIR or visited for verification is not reported.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 24/09/2026
6 Aug 2026United KingdomFacewatch facial recognition
On 6 August 2026 Matt Arnold, a comedy promoter, was refused service at a self-service till in Sainsbury's East Dulwich store and escorted out by two managers, who cited an incident earlier in the week. He says a staff member told him he had been identified by the AI and that he saw a CCTV monitor alert with a red circle around his face as he left. Sainsbury's apologised the next day, said the cause was human error rather than the facial recognition technology, and paused its Facewatch system at the store while it investigates. Facewatch says a correct alert was sent and mishandled in store; the BBC reports Sainsbury's claim that staff targeted the wrong person after a separate flag. Whose face the system matched is unresolved.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement disputed · Causal attribution disputed · 2 sources · Added 16/09/2026
14 Jul 2025 to 24 Dec 2025United StatesClearview AI facial recognition (reported)
On 14 July 2025, U.S. Marshals arrested Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old Tennessee grandmother, at gunpoint at her home while she was babysitting four children, on a nationwide-extradition North Dakota warrant: West Fargo police's AI facial-recognition technology had tied her to bank-fraud surveillance of a woman using a fake U.S. Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars. She fought extradition for about three months in a Tennessee jail, was booked into Cass County, North Dakota on 30 October 2025 on four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft, and was released on 24 December after her bank records showed her more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee; charges were dismissed without prejudice. Fargo's police chief acknowledged 'incorrect assumptions' linked to the AI identification; an email obtained by KVLY shows six Fargo detectives were notified of her arrest in July, nearly five months before the department says it knew she was in custody. She lost her home, her car and her dog; her attorneys are pursuing potential civil-rights claims, with no lawsuit filed as of 31 March 2026. On 15 September 2026 she filed a $10 million federal civil-rights suit in the District of North Dakota against the City of Fargo and the detective, alleging he relied on a flawed facial-recognition match and ignored exculpatory evidence.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 15/09/2026
1 Aug 2024 to 1 Oct 2024United StatesFACES facial recognition
In August 2024, Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old self-employed commercial crabber from the Fort Myers area, was arrested at his San Carlos Park home on a third-degree felony warrant for the attempted luring of a child at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's in November 2023 — a crime he had no part in. The warrant rested on a 93%-confidence result from FACES, the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System maintained by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, run against low-resolution cell-phone photos of a surveillance screen, plus a restaurant employee's photo-lineup identification. Dillon spent a night in jail and bonded out against his truck's title; prosecutors dropped the charges in October 2024 after work-alibi evidence, but it took about a year to expunge the arrest and remove his mugshot. In June 2026 the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit (M.D. Fla.) against Jacksonville Beach, the Jacksonville sheriff and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, calling Dillon one of at least 14 known wrongful arrests from police reliance on facial recognition since 2019.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
1 Oct 2024 to 1 Aug 2025United StatesUnidentified facial recognition system
Javier Lorenzano Nunez was arrested in October 2024 for the 1998 murder of Sarah Carr after investigators ran the old suspect's MVD photo through facial recognition databases, got 250 possible matches and zeroed in on him — with Phoenix police publicizing the arrest in a press release and a special video. Charges were dismissed without prejudice in August 2025 after forensic evidence, including DNA and fingerprints, excluded him. His lawsuit alleges Phoenix police knew from a 2017 fingerprint analysis that his prints did not match, and ignored a 2007 Puerto Rico lead on the original suspect with the same name, date of birth and social security number. He spent nearly a year in jail. The federal suit against the Phoenix Police Department and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office alleges gross negligence, false arrest, false imprisonment and defamation.
Contextual tracker case High reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 15/09/2026