HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Rite Aid Facial Recognition Disproportionately Misidentified Minority Shoppers as Shoplifters

December 20, 2023

Rite Aid employed facial recognition technology from October 2012 to July 2020, reportedly resulting in disproportionate misidentifications of women, Black, Latino, and Asian shoppers as suspected shoplifters. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed a ban on the use of this technology in Rite Aid stores for a period of five years due to these concerns. This incident underscores the need for robust governance, particularly in the realm of AI, to ensure safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
rite-aid
Alleged developer
unnamed
Alleged harmed parties
rite-aid-customers-who-were-women, rite-aid-customers-who-were-minorities, rite-aid-customers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/619

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.