Shops using an AI facial recognition system have falsely accused a number of people of stealing, a report in the Guardian has revealed.
The shoppers were approached by staff at stores using technology from Facewatch, which claims its technology is 99.98% accurate. Sports Direct, Home Bargains, Sainsbury’s, Spar and B&M are among those who use the technology.
Last month, Facewatch sent over 50,000 alerts of “known offenders” to various businesses across the country.
One person who was falsely identified was Ian Clayton, 67, who was approached by security while shopping at a Home Bargains store in February and asked to leave.
“It was like I was guilty until proven innocent. It’s an awful feeling. It leaves a pit in your stomach and when I look back now I can feel it again,” he told the Guardian. “It feels very Orwellian. We’re constantly being recorded and put on these systems but should we be there? It feels like spying without cause.”
Clayton said he was unable to get answers by calling and emailing Facewatch. He only received confirmation that he had been incorrectly tied to a shoplifting incident after submitting a subject access request using data protection laws.
Facewatch’s chief executive, Nick Fisher, said the cases referenced by the Guardian “relate to human error” rather than any failure of its technology, and that mistakes like these were “extremely rare”.
Research published last year by the National Physical Laboratory, the UK’s official measurement standards lab, found the false positive rate for facial recognition technology was 0.04% for white people but 4% for Asian people and 5.5% for black people.
The Home Office admitted in response to the research that the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”.
The use of the technology by police has expanded rapidly in recent years. The Metropolitan police is by far the largest user, with over 6.6 million faces scanned since April 2023.
It has scanned over 1.7 million in 2026 so far, a drastic increase on the 980,000 scanned during the same period last year.
From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.