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Rite Aid Is Banned From Using Facial Recognition Tech After Wrongly Accusing Customers of Shoplifting. 'The Guardian' reports that the Federal Trade Commission has banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition technology for the next five years. According to a new settlement, the pharmacy chain used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting. This was also done without customers' consent. The settlement shows that the system misidentified particularly Black, Latino and Asian people, as well as women. Rite Aid employees would then get alerts about the people it misidentified, and those people would be increasingly surveilled, banned from the store or accused of crimes. The FTC accused Rite Aid of using its facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores between October of 2012 and July of 2020. Cities that the facial recognition system was used in include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit. Civil liberty and digital rights group the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) accused Rite Aid of failing to take even the most basic precautions. "The result was sadly predictable: thousands of misidentifications that disproportionately affected Black, Asian and Latino customers, some of which led to humiliating searches and store ejections.", John Davisson, Epic’s director of litigation, via 'The Guardian'. According to Rite Aid, the AI involved in the allegations was part of a pilot program in a limited number of stores and was taken out of use three years ago. THIS VIDEO MUST NOT BE EDITED FOR LENGTH TO COMBINE WITH OTHER CONTENT