The bit about this system flagging a “single person” more than 900 times at over 130 stores without any awareness of it as bunk data is just staggering.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Rite Aid is banned from using facial recognition surveillance technology for five years to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it failed to protect consumers in hundreds of its stores, the agency said Tuesday.

Based on the faulty system, the pharmacy chain’s workers erroneously accused customers of wrongdoing in front of friends and relatives, in some cases searching them, ordering them to leave the store or reporting them to the police, according to the complaint.

According to the FTC, the retailer hired two companies to help create a database of tens of thousands of images of people that Rite Aid believed had committed crimes or intended to at one of its locations.

Rite Aid failed to test the system for accuracy, and deployed the technology even though the vendor expressly stated it couldn’t vouch for its reliability, according to the agency.

During one five-day period, Rite Aid generated more than 900 separate alerts in more than 130 stores from New York to Seattle, all claiming to match one single person in its database.

In one incident, a Rite Aid worker stopped and searched an 11-year-old girl based on a false match, with the child’s mother reporting having to miss work because her daughter was so distraught, the complaint stated.

The original article contains 514 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!