A man was ordered out of the supermarket London After staff mistakenly identified him using controversial new facial recognition technology.
An “Orwellian” error at Sainsbury’s in Elephant and Castle forced Warren Rajah to quit shopping and was told to leave the local store he has been using for 15 years.
He said supermarket staff could not explain why he was told to leave and would only direct him to a QR code leading to the website of the FaceWatch company, which the retailer had hired to implement facial recognition in some of its stores. He said that when he contacted Facewatch, he was told to send his photo and his passport photo before the company verified that there was no record of him in its database.
“One of the reasons I’m angry is because I don’t have to prove my innocence,” Raja said. “I don’t have to prove that I was wrongly identified as a criminal.” He described the incident as “extremely Minority Report, Orwellian.”
He said he was doing his usual shopping when he was approached by three members of the store, one of whom confirmed that he was the person pictured on the device they had. It means the FaceWatch system flagged someone else entering the store and staff mistook Raja for him.
Raja was concerned that the FaceWatch system would have some form of permanent record of his involvement in criminal activity. Eventually, the firm told him he wasn’t in their database and referred him back to Sainsbury’s.
“You feel so helpless in the situation because you’ve been thrown from pillar to post – because Sainsbury’s initially blames Facewatch, then Facewatch says it’s actually Sainsbury’s,” he said. “And then, when Sainsbury’s called me from the executive office on Wednesday, they blamed store staff. So they’re constantly blaming themselves for this.”
Raja was upset that he felt the need to prove his innocence — and said he was given little assurance about how the information he was supposed to hand over to FaceWatch was stored and whether it had been deleted.
And while he was lucky enough to be able to navigate the system, “What happens to vulnerable people who, for example, have learning disabilities or don’t know how to scan a QR code? They don’t have any processes or procedures in place to challenge this. You shouldn’t be expected to send your personal information – it’s completely unacceptable.”
Sainsbury’s said: “We are in contact with Mr Raja to offer our sincere apologies for his experience at our Elephant and Castle store. This was not an issue with the facial recognition technology in use but a case of contacting the wrong person in store.”
Facewatch said: “We’re sorry to hear about Mr Raja’s experience and understand why it was upsetting. The incident stemmed from a human error instore where a member of staff approached the wrong customer.
“Our data protection team followed the usual process to confirm his identity and confirmed that he was not in our database and was not subject to any alerts generated by FaceWatch.”
