Dec. 20 (UPI) — A Federal Trade Commission order Tuesday banned Rite Aid from using artificial intelligence facial recognition surveillance technology for five years because it falsely tagged women and people of color as shoplifters.
“Rite Aid’s reckless use of facial surveillance systems left its customers facing humiliation and other harms, and its order violations put consumers’ sensitive information at risk,” said a statement from FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine.
Levine called it a groundbreaking order as he vowed the FTC “will be vigilant in protecting the public from unfair biometric surveillance and unfair data security practices.”
The FTC said, Rite Aid’s actions disproportionately impacted people of color and women, generating thousands of false-positive matches.
Rite Aid was using AI-based facial recognition from 2012-2020 to ID shoplifters.
The problem, according to the FTC, is that the company allegedly failed to implement reasonable procedures to prevent the false flagging of customers who were erroneously tagged by the system.
The FTC said the real harm came when Rite Aid staff acted on the false information provided by the AI-driven tech, subjecting customers who were not shoplifters to “embarrassment, harassment, and other harm.”
“Employees, acting on false positive alerts, followed consumers around its stores, searched them, ordered them to leave, called the police to confront or remove consumers, and publicly accused them, sometimes in front of friends or family, of shoplifting or other wrongdoing, according to the complaint,” the FTC’s statement said.
Rite Aid collected thousands of images of customers, many of them low-quality, collected form store security cameras, employee phones and in some cases even news stories.
According to the FTC complaint against Rite Aid filed in Pennsylvania federal court the goal of the AI surveillance and database was to “drive and keep persons of interest out of [Rite Aid’s] stores.”
In some cases, the complaint said, Rite Aid got images of customers from law enforcement agencies for their surveillance database while encouraging employees to push to get as many images as possible into the database.
In addition to the five-year ban on using the AI technology, the FTC’s order requires Rite Aid to delete the images collected by their facial recognition system, notify customers when their biometric information is in a security or surveillance system and delete any biometric information it collects within five years.
