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A woman in London has been misidentified as a shoplifter by a facial recognition system amid fresh concerns over the technology’s accuracy and reliability

31 May 2024

A woman from London has been wrongly accused of being a shoplifter after being flagged by a facial-recognition system, the BBC reports. The tech, called Facewatch, is used by a number of retailers across the United Kingdom, including by the Home Bargains store where the woman was misidentified.

Privacy, legal and other issues and risks have plagued facial recognition for years, to the point that San Francisco, Boston, Portland and other cities in the United States eventually banned the use of facial recognition software by the police and municipal agencies. While some cities are now making a bit of a U-turn on the bans in response to rising crime rates, a number of questions surrounding the tech still persist. Among them, how can issues such as false positives be handled and, indeed, can they be prevented?

Learn more about this controversial subject in Tony’s video.

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