(I'm sure it will be fine when the government uses it in airports to track everyone traveling)
Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition software for five years, after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that the U.S. drugstore giant's “reckless use of facial surveillance systems” left customers humiliated and put their “sensitive information at risk.”
A Reuters report from 2020 detailed how the drugstore chain had secretly introduced facial recognition systems across some 200 U.S. stores over an eight-year period starting in 2012, with “largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods” serving as the technology testbed.
With the FTC's increasing focus on the misuse of biometric surveillance, Rite Aid fell firmly in the government agency's crosshairs. Among its allegations are that Rite Aid — in partnership with two contracted companies — created a “watchlist database” containing images of customers that the company said had engaged in criminal activity at one of its stores. These images, which were often poor quality, were captured from CCTV or employees' mobile phone cameras.
When a customer entered a store who supposedly matched an existing image on its database, employees would receive an automatic alert instructing them to take action — and the majority of the time this instruction was to “approach and identify,” meaning verifying the customer's identity and asking them to leave. Often, these “matches” were false positives that led to employees incorrectly accusing customers of wrongdoing, creating “embarrassment, harassment, and other harm,” according to the FTC.
Someone think of the thievorinos!
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We do everything China does, the difference is the discretion is handed over to the corporations
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