According to the US Federal Trade Commission’s December 2023 complaint, “from at least approximately October 2012 until July 2020, Rite Aid has used facial recognition technology in hundreds of its retail pharmacy locations” to flag shoppers it suspected of shoplifting - roughly eight years of operation across hundreds of stores, without telling customers it was happening.
The complaint says that “in numerous instances, the match alerts that led to these actions were false positives,” and that acting on those false matches, employees followed, searched, banned, publicly accused, or called the police on innocent shoppers. The FTC found the failures were “likely to cause substantial injury to consumers, and especially to Black, Asian, Latino, and women consumers.” The resulting settlement banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition for surveillance for five years. See 2023-ftc-rite-aid-facial-recognition-ban.