Technology
Rite Aid has previously used facial recognition through hundreds of its stores.
Drugstore giant Rite Aid illegally installed facial recognition apps through a network of surveillance cameras in hundreds of stores across the US, according to a recent Reuters report released on Tuesday. The company has been doing this for more than eight years and has only recently stopped using the technology, Reuters said, amid a "larger industry debate" about facial recognition and serious questions regarding privacy threats and racial discrimination.
Yet, according to Reuters, Rite Aid originally defended the use of facial recognition as a barrier to robbery and violent crime, having little to do with race. The inquiry showed that it was not completely accurate.
In areas where people of color, including Black or Latino citizens, were the main racial or ethnic group, Reuters found that stores were more than three times more likely to have technology, reads the report.
After presenting its findings to the client, Reuters says that Rite Aid released a new statement saying that it had switched off its cameras. This decision was partially based on a broader business discussion, Rite Aid said. Many major technology firms seem to be scaling back or rethinking their facial recognition projects, despite the increasing confusion about the importance of technology.
Concerns regarding the unchecked use of facial recognition in the US, both by law enforcement and private businesses, have gradually escalated over the past few years, fuelled by studies that indicate that the technology in its current form is fundamentally defective and more likely to misclassify the gender and identity of Black individuals. Numerous corporations have now publicly renounced the technology in one way or another. IBM claims that it will no longer invest in or improve technology, and both Amazon and Microsoft state that they are halting facial recognition contracts with law enforcement before Congress passes legislation governing their sale and use.
A number of city councils, such as Oakland , California, have also started to prohibit the use of technology by the police.
The that concern among advocates, artificial intelligence researchers and lawmakers is that technology is being marketed and used in secret, without oversight or control that could protect against human rights violations. Corporations like Clearview AI — which was found to have offered a powerful facial recognition database and search tool to numerous law enforcement agencies and private companies — have emerged as the public face of the threat that technology presents to privacy and other at-risk civil liberties.
Now, it looks like even the run-of-the-mill retail chains, including Rite Aid, would use facial recognition in secret.
Of special concern in the case of Rite Aid is that the company used the software of the manufacturer, DeepCam, with ties to the Chinese business, Reuters reports. Previously, Rite Aid used a company called FaceFirst, which until 2017 did not rely on any form of artificial intelligence and as a result routinely misidentified people, often Black individuals, based on blurred photos of their cameras captured, Reuters reports.
The purpose of the operation as a whole, the report states, was to warn the security staff to anyone entering the store who had participated in previous illegal activity, so that they could be told to leave to help deter robbery or violence.
Yet Reuters' interviews with former staff and executives show how the program has been used for racial profiling of clients.
Although Rite Aid would not disclose which stores used the cameras, Reuters found them at 33 out of 75 Rite Aid locations in New York and Los Angeles from last October to this month.
Rite Aid told customers that the cameras were checking their faces as they passed through the store, but the report found that at least a third of the stores using facial recognition systems were lacking the correct signage.
