Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people – particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people – on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years. The FTC said in a federal court complaint that Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers "it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior". The technology sent alerts to Rite Aid employees either by email or phone when it identified people entering the store on its watchlist. The FTC said in its complaint that store employees would then put those people under increased surveillance, ban them from making purchases or accuse them in front of friends, family and other customers of previously committing crimes.

Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition technology for five years over allegations that its surveillance system was used incorrectly to identify potential shoplifters, especially Black, Latino, Asian or female shoppers. The settlement with the Federal Trade Commission addresses charges that the struggling drugstore chain didn't do enough to prevent harm to its customers and implement "reasonable procedures," the government agency said. Rite Aid said late Tuesday that it disagrees with the allegations, but that it's glad it reached an agreement to resolve the issue. The FTC said in a federal court complaint that technology used by Rite Aid for several years led to thousands of incorrect matches, including an incident where Rite Aid store employees stopped and searched an 11-year-old girl. Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers "it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior," the FTC said. The complaint noted that many images it used for its database were low-quality, coming from security cameras, employee phone cameras and news stories in some cases.

Rite Aid will not be able to use any kind of facial recognition security system for next five years as part of its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which accused it of "reckless use of facial surveillance systems." The FTC said in its complaint that the drugstore chain deployed an artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology from 2012 to 2020 to identify customers who may have previously shoplifted or have engaged in problematic behavior. Apparently, the company had created a database with "tens of thousands" of customer images, along with their names, dates of birth and alleged crimes. Those photos were of poor quality, taken by its security cameras, employees' phones and even from news stories. As a result, the system generated thousands of false-positive alerts.

But the chain's "reckless" failure to adopt safeguards, coupled with the technology's long history of inaccurate matches and racial biases, ultimately led store employees to falsely accuse shoppers of theft, leading to "embarrassment, harassment, and other harm" in front of their family members, co-workers and friends, the FTC said in a statement.

A: We had actually embarked on this before the pandemic. When I first got to the company, I said, "You can live anywhere you want." We established WebEx at the time and got everyone trained. I was hiring people from all over the country and allowing them to work from home and come in for meetings and collaboration. So when the pandemic hit, we were pretty well-prepared.

Just over two weeks after an unprecedented hack led to the compromise of the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and dozens more, authorities have charged three men in connection with the incident. The alleged "mastermind" is a 17-year-old from Tampa, who will be tried as an adult. There are still plenty of details outstanding about how they might have pulled it off, but court documents show how a trail of bitcoin and IP addresses led investigators to the alleged hackers. A Garmin ransomware hack disrupted more than just workouts during a days-long outage; security researchers see it as part of a troubling trend of "big game hunting" among ransomware groups. In other alarming trends, hackers are breaking into news sites to publish misinformation through their content management systems, giving them an air of legitimacy.

The news agency Reuters recently posted a story outlining and confirming how the U.S. drugstore chain Rite-Aid had been using facial recognition technology – cameras and AI algorithms – to monitor customers in some of its stores in New York City and L.A. The computer vision tech was being used mostly in lower-income, non-white neighborhoods as a counter-measure to theft, looking for known or suspected criminals. Over about eight years, the American drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp quietly added facial recognition systems to 200 stores across the United States, in one of the largest rollouts of such technology among retailers in the country, a Reuters investigation found. In the hearts of New York and metro Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods, according to a Reuters analysis. And for more than a year, the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government. In telephone and email exchanges with Reuters since February, Rite Aid confirmed the existence and breadth of its facial recognition program.

This week, Reuters reported that the American drugstore chain Rite Aid has deployed facial recognition systems in 200 stores nationwide over the past eight years. And the story gets very, very hairy. Since Rite Aid refused to disclose where it used such technology, Reuters reporters took it upon themselves to visit 75 locations in the central Los Angeles metropolitan area and Manhattan. Of these, 33 had "easily recognizable" facial recognition cameras. According to Reuters, storefronts in low-income areas were almost three times as likely to have facial recognition cameras present than those in wealthier neighborhoods.

Rite Aid used facial recognition systems in hundreds of its drugstores across the US over the last several years. According to a Reuters investigation, the technology was deployed in "largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods" in New York and Los Angeles and had been in use for over eight years. The system was designed to identify customers who the company previously had detected were "engaging in potential criminal activity." An alert would then be sent to a security agent via smartphone, who'd then check whether the match was accurate and, if so, possibly ask that person to leave the store. As of last week, Rite Aid had pulled the plug on the software, which was present in around 200 locations, owing to a "larger industry conversation" about facial recognition.

Drugstore chain Rite Aid secretly deployed facial recognition software across a network of security cameras in hundreds of locations in the US, according to a new investigation from Reuters published on Tuesday. The company had been doing so for more than eight years, and it only recently stopped using the technology, it told Reuters, following a "larger industry conversation" around facial recognition and the grave concern over privacy risks and racial discrimination it presents. Yet, Reuters says Rite Aid initially defended its use of facial recognition as a deterrent against theft and violent crime, having nothing to do with race. The investigation found that not to be entirely true. "In areas where people of color, including Black or Latino residents, made up the largest racial or ethnic group, Reuters found that stores were more than three times as likely to have the technology," the report reads.