FTC Bans Rite Aid From Using Facial Recognition for Five Years After the System Misidentified Thousands of Shoppers — Disproportionately Black, Asian, Latino — as Shoplifters. Customers Were Publicly Accused, Searched, and Banned From Stores They'd Never Stolen From.

Dec 2023 FTC consent order: Rite Aid deployed facial recognition across 200+ stores (2012–2020) using low-quality CCTV stills and a 'no-match-needed' alert threshold. The system flagged thousands of false positives — a Black woman confronted by cops in front of her kids for a theft 1,200 miles away, a Latino teen banned for life for a crime the database said happened when he was in elementary school. Bias was so severe that FTC calls it 'reckless.' Rite Aid is banned from using the tech until 2028.