FTC Bans Rite Aid AI Facial Recognition to Fight Shoplifting – HotAir

As we’ve covered here repeatedly, retail outlets have been increasingly subject to incidents of shoplifting and mass retail theft. This is particularly true of pharmacies, where thieves can find all sorts of goods that can be easily resold on the streets, not to mention prescription drugs in some cases. All too often, particularly in larger cities, municipal governments haven’t seemed particularly interested in assisting and unleashing law enforcement to deal with the problem. Rite Aid hasn’t been immune to this scourge, but rather than closing down like some of their competitors, they took matters into their own hands and tried to do something about it. They invested in next-generation facial recognition technology powered by Artificial Intelligence that scanned the faces of people on the premises, matching the faces with known shoplifters and “problematic shoppers.” But…