Incident 665: Facial Recognition Misidentification at New World Westend in New Zealand
Description: A facial recognition system at New World Westend supermarket misidentified a Māori woman as a known offender during its trial. The woman was wrongfully accused of trespassing and experienced public embarrassment, raising concerns about racial bias and the technology's accuracy. The supermarket acknowledged its error and apologized.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Foodstuffs developed an AI system deployed by Foodstuffs and New World Westend, which harmed Te Ani Solomon and Māori Community.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
665
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-04-02
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
nzherald.co.nz · 2024
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
A Māori mum misidentified as a trespassed “thief” at a Rotorua supermarket trialling facial recognition technology says she felt “racially discriminated” against and embarrassed during the “horrible” birthday incident.
The supermarket, New …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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