Rite Aid used facial recognition systems in hundreds of its drugstores across the US over the last several years. According to a Reuters investigation, the technology was deployed in ālargely lower-income, non-white neighborhoodsā in New York and Los Angeles and had been in use for over eight years.
The system was designed to identify customers who the company previously had detected were āengaging in potential criminal activity.ā An alert would then be sent to a security agent via smartphone, whoād then check whether the match was accurate and, if so, possibly ask that person to leave the store.
As of last week, Rite Aid had pulled the plug on the software, which was present in around 200 locations, owing to a ālarger industry conversationā about facial recognition. āOther large technology companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technologyās utility,ā the company said.
IBM said last month itād no longer work on facial recognition, in part due to concerns about surveillance and racial profiling. A number of studies have suggested racial bias is present in facial recognition tech, and there have been at least two cases in which Black men were wrongfully arrested after being falsely identified as suspects by such software.
Rite Aid said that its use of the system had ānothing to do with race.ā The report suggests otherwise, as Reuters found that stores were āmore than three times as likely to have the technologyā in areas where people of color āmade up the largest racial or ethnic group.ā
Meanwhile, the drugstore chain used facial recognition tech from a company that has ties to China, which raised some concerns that data might have been sent to that countryās government. However, Reuters says it didnāt find any evidence of that being the case.