Rite Aid used face recognition to scan the faces of every single customer who walked into hundreds of its stores in a program encompassing most of the past decade, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Rite Aid used face recognition to scan the faces of every single customer who walked into hundreds of its stores in a program encompassing most of the past decade, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The program spanned eight years, two vendors, and was implemented in 200 stores—a disproportionate number of which were located in non-white, low-income neighborhoods. CCTV cameras would record everyone entering those stores. Then their faces would be analyzed and added to a unique “profile,” though customers were very likely unaware of its existence. Managers could also approve Rite Aid loss prevention (security) staffers to add individuals they found to be suspicious or potentially engaged in criminal activity to a watch list. Any time an individual the system identified as on the watch list entered the store, as well as prompted to check for accuracy. They could then take action such as asking the person to leave. Reuters visited all 75 Rite Aid locations in Manhattan and central Los Angeles from October 2019 to July 2020, finding face recognition systems in 33 of them. Stores located in impoverished neighborhoods or which had high populations of non-white people were several times more likely to have the cameras: Face recognition tech is demonstrably racist: research has shown that systems relying on it often have high error rates and fare worse when trying to identify Black and other people of color, particularly women. Even if developers somehow manage to eliminate racial bias in recognition, that doesn’t eliminate bias on behalf of the operator, so the technology can easily be weaponized to target people of color, activists, immigrants and refugees, the homeless, or other groups.
