I heard an interesting story on the radio this morning. An elderly British man needed to buy some groceries. So he went down to a local shop to pick up his bread, milk and so on.
As he was walking through the aisles, selecting products, one of the shop staff came over to him.
“I am sorry, but I am going to have to ask you to leave the shop, Sir.”
The confused old man was led away towards the door. At the door, he turned around and asked why he was being thrown out.
“Our cameras have facial recognition software. We have a contract with a company that registers the faces of suspected serial shoplifters. The software has just set off an alarm, telling us that you are a serial shoplifter.”
The old man had never stolen anything from a shop in his life. He protested his innocence. The shop staff gave the man the contact details of the company which had registered his face as that of a criminal.
After some emails and discussion back and forth with this company, it was accepted that the man’s face had been added to the database in error. He had visited a shop at around the same time that a shoplifter had. The elderly man had to go through his banking details with the company to prove that he had paid for the items he had bought in the shop.
So in the end the elderly man’s face was removed from the database of suspected shoplifters. But he says he feels nervous when out shopping, and tries to avoid walking in front of surveillance cameras, in case the same thing happens again and he is shamed in public like a criminal.
It seems like this is the future. As more and more often we are being watched by technology, who is watching the technology?
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