Sainsbury's has suspended its use of live facial recognition technology at its East Dulwich store in London after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the premises.
Matt Arnold, 46, a comedy promoter, was buying supplies for a stand-up event at the adjacent Dulwich Hamlet Football Club on 6 August when two members of store management told him he could not be served because of an incident "earlier in the week", and asked him to leave. As he walked out, he saw an overhead CCTV screen showing an alert with a red circle tracking his face. "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," he told BBC London, describing the experience as a "terrifying glimpse of the future".
Sainsbury's apologized the following day and offered a £150 goodwill voucher, which Arnold donated to a local food bank. The retailer insists the mistake was caused by human error, not the software: the Facewatch system, it says, has a 99.98% accuracy rate and every match is reviewed by a trained manager. Facewatch says a correct alert was sent but mishandled in store, and that the suspension is a precautionary measure while staff undergo additional training.
Privacy campaigners are unconvinced. Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch says the retailer is "treating customers like criminals" and that serious mistakes are inevitable when a national retailer does hundreds of thousands of ID checks. Arnold notes that 0.02% of millions of weekly shoppers is a lot of people — and that a similar wrongful ejection happened at Sainsbury's Elephant and Castle branch last year. "If they're suspending it in this East Dulwich store, they are conceding there's a problem with it. Why aren't they suspending it in every store?"
