<story><title>Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/rite-aid-facial-recognition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not defending Rite-Aid at all, but &lt;i&gt;that&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; not the problem here.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person.&lt;p&gt;Facial recognition software should &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; necessary.&lt;p&gt;(What you&amp;#x27;re talking about is 1,280 false positives a day, or less than 1 per store per day.)&lt;p&gt;Again -- &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; defending Rite-Aid here. Just saying that there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with the &lt;i&gt;statistics&lt;/i&gt; of it.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;usnistgov&amp;#x2F;frvt&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;nist-pages&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;1N&amp;#x2F;frvt_1N_report_2020_03_27.pdf&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;usnistgov&amp;#x2F;frvt&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;nist-pages&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;1N...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;careers.riteaid.com&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;company-info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;careers.riteaid.com&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;company-info&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I would contest that. Determining if someone is the same person as a low-quality photo is not necessarily something a human can do, and that&amp;#x27;s especially true if the human in question A: basically doesn&amp;#x27;t care and is likely to screw it up every way it is possible to screw it up and B: is influenced by whether or not they&amp;#x27;re willing to directly confront someone who is nominally a criminal while they&amp;#x27;re being paid the de facto local minimum wage.&lt;p&gt;This plan is all sorts of infeasible and frankly stupid, and the purely human concerns are sufficient for that determination even before we add the tech in.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/rite-aid-facial-recognition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not defending Rite-Aid at all, but &lt;i&gt;that&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; not the problem here.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person.&lt;p&gt;Facial recognition software should &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; necessary.&lt;p&gt;(What you&amp;#x27;re talking about is 1,280 false positives a day, or less than 1 per store per day.)&lt;p&gt;Again -- &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; defending Rite-Aid here. Just saying that there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with the &lt;i&gt;statistics&lt;/i&gt; of it.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;usnistgov&amp;#x2F;frvt&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;nist-pages&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;1N&amp;#x2F;frvt_1N_report_2020_03_27.pdf&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;usnistgov&amp;#x2F;frvt&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;nist-pages&amp;#x2F;reports&amp;#x2F;1N...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;careers.riteaid.com&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;company-info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;careers.riteaid.com&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;company-info&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>&amp;gt;  .. then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person&lt;p&gt;Yes - but the &amp;quot;approach and identify&amp;quot; of false positives&amp;#x2F;innocent people was the actual embarrassment and harassment that the system got banned for, it was the human review (asking for ID etc) that was the issue.</text></comment>