Facial Recognition Misidentification at New World Westend in New Zealand

April 2, 2024

A facial recognition system at New World Westend supermarket in New Zealand misidentified a Māori woman as a known offender, causing public embarrassment. This incident highlights potential racial bias and inaccuracies within the technology. The supermarket acknowledged its error and apologized. This unfortunate event underscores the need for safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping the future of responsible AI governance through Project Cerebellum's TAIM (Govern), this incident serves as a crucial example. JOIN US

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.638, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.632, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.630, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: foodstuffs, new-world-westend
Alleged developer: foodstuffs
Alleged harmed parties: te-ani-solomon, maori-community

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/665

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.