Both Facewatch and Sainsbury’s point to the software’s “99.98% accuracy” – but Rajah suspects the margin of error is higher and has questions about the dataset behind this claim, and if it is representative of a range of body types and skin colours.
99.98% looks good to a layman, but that number is meaningless in reality.
Is that 0.02% error false positives or false negatives, or both?
Also, 0.02% means 2 in every 10,000. I don’t think it takes long for 10,000 people to go through the doors of Sainsburys every day, considering the UK population is about 65 million and they’re a nationwide company. Once this is rolled out nationwide they’re going to have constant false flags.
Scumbag oppressive tactics by a scumbag company.
Yeah, 0.02% of 65 Million is 1.3 Million possible errors.
And that’s just based on the raw population, that accuracy rating could be based on raw number of scans instead. A quick search shows Sainsbury’s serves 16 million customers a week. That’s 320,000 errors every week if the error rate is just raw scans as opposed to unique scans.
Your math is off, by two decimal places.
Indeed, it’s still a ridiculous amount of errors though.
65,000,000 x (0.02%) = 13,000 possible errors
16,000,000 x (0.02%) = 3,200 errors every week
3,200 potentially pissed off and put off customers each week, how long is that sustainable?
And the dataset is prbably racist, although in the reported case, it sounds like good old unreliable cross-race recognition by humans, with the evil eye pinging because it spotted someone and the store staff then telling the wrong person to naff off. It seems like a process or training failure if they don’t ask the evil eye to confirm they’ve got the person it flagged before upsetting them.
He was redirected to Sainsbury’s, which apologised and offered him a £75 shopping voucher.
Get absolutely fucked Sainsbury’s, what a joke. “We’re sorry we called you a criminal and chucked you out of our shop, here’s some fake toy money you can only spend at the same place we humiliated you in.”
Did they start with the dulux software as a starting point? 99.98% Shade match = clearly guilty. 57.4% shade match enable the Jaffa cakes offer.
Good on this guy standing up to this. It’s racism, whilst it might seem subtle it’s still systematic.
Thing is Sainsbury have learnt nothing from this and reasserted theair faith in facial recognition, blaming human error in store for grabbing wrong person. I feel we’ll see more of this in future.
The software they used was the difficulty slider from South Park: The Fractured But Whole.
The only supermarket chain I was accused of shoplifting at, was a Sainsbury’s. I think the only thing I ever shoplifted, in my life, was one or two chewing gums that were sold for 1-2p each, as a kid over 30 years ago.
This was before the facial recognition thing was implemented, however not that long ago (late 2010s). I lectured the security guard right then and there, informing him of just how peeved I was at such blatant excuses for prejudice.
To be fair I believe he did apologise, and I was rather visibly offended, however I cannot imagine most people would be able to bring themselves to a defense in such situations. As if these things only exist to bully those who are expected to not stand up.
