Sainsbury’s is to continue with its rollout of facial recognition technology to more than 200 stores by the end of this year, despite the system causing an innocent shopper to be wrongly accused of shoplifting and ejected from a store earlier this month.
Matt Arnold, a producer at a TV production company, had been shopping at a Sainsbury’s superstore in East Dulwich, buying drinks and snacks for a nearby comedy club at which he is a promoter.
Having scanned the shopping at a self-checkout and waiting for staff to approve his age, a member of staff said he couldn’t serve Arnold because his “face had triggered the new AI facial recognition software and the staff member informed me I wasn’t allowed to shop there because of something I’d done earlier in the week”.
“I hadn’t been there earlier in the week,” Arnold said.
“It seems that AI facial recognition, as well as being extremely morally questionable, also isn’t very good. The store staff wouldn’t tell me what I’d done, they wouldn’t show me the footage of this person, supposedly me, from earlier in the week,” Arnold added.
“No, they just kindly offered to ‘escort me off the premises’, and said I should scan the QR code on the door and take it up with the, dystopian sounding, Facewatch who provide the service,” he said.
Sainsbury’s told The Grocer it had apologised to Arnold for “his experience” at the store, but a spokesperson insisted “the incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology”.
The Facewatch system being rolled out by the supermarket uses facial recognition to alert Sainsbury’s stores when a person “reasonably suspected of involvement in crime” – reported by Sainsbury’s staff or other retailers in the area – enters the premises. It is used to help identify and possibly ban people who are “violent, aggressive or steal in the store” Sainsbury’s has previously explained.
“Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager,” the spokesperson added.
The security system has seen innocent individuals wrongly confronted as shoplifters, typically because staff see an image of an actual suspected criminal, but approach the wrong person in the store.
A Facewatch spokesperson told The Grocer that in Arnold’s case, its “live facial recognition technology was not at fault in this incident”.
“A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled and communicated by the retailer,” they said.
Sainsbury’s has temporarily suspended the use of Facewatch technology from the Dulwich superstore to further investigate, and if necessary provide additional staff training, it said.
“When we suspend a retailer from our system,” the Facewatch spokesperson continued, “this is a precautionary measure that prevents the store from receiving further alerts while the retailer reviews its use of the system and undertakes appropriate actions, including further colleague training where necessary.”
The company – whose technology is also used by Home Bargains, Southern Co-op, Budgens, Costcutter and several independent convenience stores – added that “no security system involving human decision-making can eliminate the possibility of human error entirely”.
“The important questions are whether robust safeguards are in place, whether lessons are learned when human error occurs, and whether the technology is making stores safer,” the spokesperson said.
It is not the first time Sainsbury’s has had to apologise to a customer as a result of its adoption of the technology. In February, it was forced to apologise to a customer after they were escorted out of a store over a mix-up with staff and the store’s facial recognition system. Sainsbury’s said at the time it was “not an issue with the facial recognition technology in use but a case of the wrong person being approached in the store”.
Facial recognition technology has proven controversial, and supermarkets’ use of it has been the focus of the campaigning of civil liberties groups.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, called on the supermarket to ditch the technology completely.
“Pausing live facial recognition in one Sainsbury’s store does nothing to protect the millions of people at risk of similarly appalling treatment in the stores all over the country where exactly the same cameras are being used. Sainsbury’s needs to drop this system completely,” Carlo said.
“Serious mistakes like this are inevitable when a national retailer does hundreds of thousands of ID checks indiscriminately with this sinister surveillance tech. This man was humiliated and publicly accused of crimes he hadn’t committed in front of colleagues. Not only is mass facial recognition like this a grave invasion of shoppers’ privacy, but false accusations like this could affect people’s jobs and relationships,” she added.
“Worse, Facewatch shares its data across multiple stores, meaning people can find themselves electronically blacklisted from their supermarkets and high streets with no fair process and without even being told,” Carlo said.
The supermarket said the effectiveness of the technology in reducing crime was “clear” with earlier trials seeing a 46% reduction in logged incidents of theft, harm, aggression and anti-social behaviour, and 92% of identified and banned offenders not returning to its stores.
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