Federal Trade Commission Stop RITE AID Using Facial Recognition. Rite Aid Orwellian surveillance
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Stop RITE AID Using Facial Recognition. Rite Aid Orwellian surveillance
The Federal Trade Commission proposed to bar Rite Aid
from using facial recognition software in its drugstores for five years to settle allegations it improperly used the technology to identify shoplifters, the agency said Tuesday.
The FTC alleged that from 2012 to 2020, Rite Aid deployed facial recognition technology in hundreds of its retail pharmacies across several states in order to identify customers it had previously deemed likely to be shoplifting or engaging in other criminal activity. But the system generated thousands of false-positive matches, according to the FTC, resulting in some shoppers being mistakenly flagged as persons of interest.
Over about eight years, the American drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp quietly added facial recognition systems to 200 stores across the United States, in one of the largest rollouts of such technology among retailers in the country, a Reuters investigation found.
In the hearts of New York and metro Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods, according to a Reuters analysis. And for more than a year, the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/ftc-b...
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/...