Description: A facial-recognition software used by the British variety store Home Bargains is alleged to have misidentified "Sara" as a shoplifter, leading to staff searching her bag, escorting her from the premises, and banning her from the store. After, Facewatch is reported to have admitted its error to Sara. Facewatch is used by a number of different British stores.
Editor Notes: Incidents 691 and 692 are paired together in the reporting, but they are two separate, discrete harm events. I have created distinct incident IDs for each while replicating the reporting for each one.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Facewatch developed an AI system deployed by Home Bargains, which harmed Sara , Home Bargains customers and General public.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
691
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2024-05-25
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
bbc.com · 2024
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Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store.
"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."
S…
thetimes.co.uk · 2024
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Shoppers have been warned that facial recognition software used by stores is wrongly identifying some innocent customers as thieves.
A woman said that an employee at Home Bargains, the variety store chain, accused her of being a shoplifter …
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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