Alleged Macy's Facial Recognition Error Leads to Wrongful Arrest and Subsequent Sexual Assault in Jail

January 22, 2022

Harvey Murphy Jr., a victim of an alleged facial recognition error by Macy's, was wrongfully accused of robbing a Sunglass Hut. During his ten-day detention, he suffered sexual assault. He is now suing Macy's, EssilorLuxottica (Sunglass Hut's parent), and others, for $10 million. This incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI governance and harm prevention measures in AI systems. To learn more about the role you can play in ensuring safe and secure AI practices, visit JOIN US. For those interested in mapping this incident to the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern), please do so accordingly.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.607, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.2 — similarity 0.595, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.594, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: macy's
Alleged developer: unknown, macy's
Alleged harmed parties: harvey-murphy-jr

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/630

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.