149
London man angry at ‘Orwellian’ incident in supermarket using facial recognition tech
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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If you read the story, you'll see that it was face recognition by humans that was at fault, not automated face recognition. It would be like if the store had a picture posted in the staff room that said "Do not let this person shop here," and the staff had thought this shopper was the guy in error.
That's a bit of a stretch to say the system was not at fault. The system pops up an alert and says he this brown guy should not be in your store and shows a picture of a brown guy, staff go out and find a different brown guy and kick him out of the store. It's still the system which is the issue, it scanned faces, sent and alert, but wasn't able to accurately communicate to the staff which specific person they should be worried about. The staff aren't facial recognition experts, the shitty system led to this issue occuring.
Corey Doctrow calls the humans in this loop reverse centaurs..
Edit: not unicorns
"Idiot Store Staff Mistake Someone For Someone Else" doesn't get the same clicks.