Facewatch Reported to Have Wrongfully Flagged Home Bargains Customer as Shoplifter

May 25, 2024

A facial-recognition software, Facewatch, employed by the British variety store Home Bargains, has reportedly misidentified a customer named 'Sara', wrongfully accusing her of shoplifting. This led to a search of her bag, her removal from the premises, and a store ban. Facewatch subsequently admitted their error to Sara.

Facewatch is utilized by numerous British retailers, raising concerns about trustworthy AI practices. In this context, it's essential to implement safeguards for AI, such as HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to prevent similar incidents.
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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.589, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.589, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.582, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

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.