Rite Aid "covert surveillance program" falsely ID'd customers as shoplifters, FTC says

Rite Aid is banned from using facial recognition surveillance technology for five years to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it failed to protect consumers in hundreds of its stores, the agency said Tuesday.

Rite Aid used a "covert surveillance program" based on AI to ID potential shoplifters from 2012 to 2020, the FTC said in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Based on the faulty system, the pharmacy chain's workers erroneously accused customers of wrongdoing in front of friends and relatives, in some cases searching them, ordering them to leave the store or reporting them to the police, according to the complaint. 

According to the FTC, the retailer hired two companies to help create a database of tens of thousands of images of people that Rite Aid believed had committed crimes or intended to at one of its locations. Collected from security cameras, employee phone cameras and even news stories, many of the images were of poor quality, with the system generating thousands of false positives, the FTC alleges.