Sainsbury’s halts facial recognition at London store after false accusation

Sainsbury’s has suspended the use of its live facial recognition technology at one of its London stores after a customer was wrongly accused of being a shoplifter.

Matt Arnold, 46, was attempting to buy alcohol at a self-service checkout at the supermarket’s East Dulwich store when he was stopped by two members of management.

After already scanning his items alongside his Nectar loyalty card, Arnold was told that he had been identified by the facial recognition technology in connection with an incident ‘earlier in the week’.

‘They came over and said I had to leave. The staff member said I’d been identified by the AI, and the cameras had flagged me,’ the comedy promoter told BBC London.

‘A shoplifter does not walk around with that much shopping, they don’t scan it through, they don’t put their Nectar card through.’

Describing it as a ‘terrifying glimpse of the future’, Arnold warned that staff could feel forced to follow automated alerts without using their own judgement.

He added: ‘What upset me was thinking this is what the future could be – people just listen to what the machine tells them to do without thinking about the consequences.’

After being escorted from the store, Arnold later noticed an overhead CCTV screen that displayed his face inside a red circle.

In the days after the incident, Sainsbury’s head office contacted him to apologise, saying there had been a human error.

The supermarket also said it has now paused the technology at the East Dulwich store while it investigates what happened.

A spokesperson said: ‘We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology.

‘Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager.’

Technology firm Facewatch, who supply the technology and claims that it has a 99.8% accuracy, has also maintained that its technology was not responsible for the incident.

‘A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store,’ a spokesperson said.

However, for Arnold, he claimed that ‘there are more people than me who have been caught out by this’ and mistakes are ‘going to happen’ as staff are ‘not being equipped to implement the AI properly’.

This comes after another Sainsbury’s customer, Warren Rajah, was wrongly challenged for shoplifting following a facial recognition alert in a Sainsbury’s branch in Elephant and Castle.

In June it was revealed by the British Transport Police that out of 330,000 commuters scanned with facial recognition cameras in London, only one person has been flagged as a criminal, and even that was a false alarm.

Silkie Carlo, the director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, has called on Sainsbury’s to scrap the techonology all together after claiming that it is ‘treating customers like criminals’.

‘Serious mistakes like this are inevitable when a national retailer does hundreds of thousands of ID checks indiscriminately with this sinister surveillance tech,’ she told the BBC.

WTX has contacted Sainsbury’s for comment.