A man who was wrongly accused of fraud after AI face recognition software had marked his image, said that he “will never step again” in a direct sports store.
An employee of the Parkgate shopping center in Rotherham had identified Craig Hadley a few weeks earlier after being mistaken for another “baldly, bearded” customer who had cheated the retailer.
Sports immediately apologized for the incident and said that it was “real mistake” and added that a formal investigation and further staff training would be followed.
Hadley said: “At first I thought it was a joke, but then it became clear that it was pretty serious and they guided me out of the store.”
He said he had been “really anxious” in the weeks needed to solve the problem.
“There was a fear that my photo was in other stores where they would throw me out,” he added.
“It caused shame, it can cause reputation damage.”
Mr Hadley said he “would never step again” in Sports Direct (BBC)
The software company, FaceWatch, removed Mr Hadley’s image from his database after he had proven his identity to the company and the CCTV had been manually checked.
Mr Hadley agreed that the fraudster, who had been at the same time he had paid, “very similar” looked like “.
“I understand it was a human mistake and people make mistakes,” he said.
“But if those mistakes can lead to people who have not done anything wrong to be placed in a national database, there must still be some checks and balances.”
Madeleine Stone, from the Civil Liberties Campaign Group Big Brother Watch, said that the use of software such as FaceWatch was to deal with shoplifting was a “recipe for a disaster”.
“You could be blacklisted by your local stores, to be placed on a secret watchist, and that information is shared in all stores in your area,” she said.
“There is not necessarily proof of misconduct and there is no appropriate process.
“Many people are really affected by this.”
A representative of the FaceWatch told Mr Hadley that the wrong avoidance of people in the database was “of the utmost importance” for the company.
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