Sainsbury's staff eject wrong shopper after facial recognition alert – again
Sainsbury's staff removed an innocent shopper from one of its stores after a facial recognition system incorrectly flagged them as a person of concern, marking at least a second known incident of this kind at the UK supermarket chain.
Why this matters: Facial recognition in shops does not just make mistakes once. It makes the same mistake again, to a different innocent person, and staff act on it anyway. That person gets treated like a criminal in public, with no warning and no real recourse. The system flags you, the staff ejects you, and the burden of proving you belong there falls entirely on you. Repeated false positives are not a glitch. They are the expected output of this technology applied at scale to ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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