Apple facial recognition goes haywire, teen gets wrongly accused of shoplifting

Apple is being sued for $1B:

Ousmane Bah, 18, filed suit against Cook & Co this week after he was falsely identified as a shoplifter by, it is claimed, a facial recognition system Apple is apparently using in its stores. 

Bah was wrongly accused by the cops of nicking gear from Apple's posh shops across the US East Coast, even in cities he claims never to have visited, due to Apple's technology incorrectly fingering him as the culprit, we're told. 

The teen's legal complaint [PDF] states that last year the college student received a letter out of the blue summoning him to a Boston court on an allegation of theft. He was accused of stealing multiple Apple Pencils – a $99 tool used for the iPad Pro – from an Apple Store in the Massachusetts city, adding up to over $1,200 in swag. 

At the time of the alleged crime, on May 31, 2018, Bah was attending his senior prom in Manhattan, and had never even been to Boston before.

Worse, the photo included in his arrest warrant doesn't look like him.  Facial recognition has been plagued with errors, particularly with non-caucasians.  I don't know exactly why this is, but it has been a persistent complaint for several years.  Apple is said to use facial recognition in its stores to detect shoplifting.  When Bah had been (incorrectly) identified as a shoplifter in one store, the store personnel took his driver's permit and used his name and address information to update their database.  His permit did not have a photo on it, and so now someone else's picture is associated with him.

And now Bah has an arrest record and Apple is defending itself against an enormous lawsuit.  Hey, at least their software didn't kill anyone.

This is why I won't get into a self-driving car.  The code was written by snotty programmers who think they know way more than they actually do about how the world works.