HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Facewatch Reported to Have Wrongfully Flagged Home Bargains Customer as Shoplifter

May 25, 2024

A facial-recognition software used by the British variety store Home Bargains is alleged to have misidentified "Sara" as a shoplifter, leading to staff searching her bag, escorting her from the premises, and banning her from the store. After, Facewatch is reported to have admitted its error to Sara. Facewatch is used by a number of different British stores.
Alleged deployer
home-bargains
Alleged developer
facewatch
Alleged harmed parties
sara, home-bargains-customers, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/691

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.