Student files $1 billion lawsuit against Apple for facial recognition led to false arrest

According to a new report from New York Post, an 18-year-old New York teen is suing Apple for $1 billion, alleging the company used facial recognition technology to wrongly identify him as a thief.

The police arrested Bah last November over a series of alleged thefts in Apple’s brick-and-mortart stories in Boston, New Jersey, Delaware and Manhattan. In his lawsuit filed Monday, Bah argues that the arrest warrant included a photo that didn’t really resemble him.

According to the lawsuit:

Apple’s use of facial recognition software in its stores to track individuals suspected of theft is the type of Orwellian surveillance that consumers fear, particularly as it can be assumed that the majority of consumers are not aware that their faces are secretly being analyzed.

“He was forced to respond to multiple false allegations which led to severe stress and hardship,” the complaint reads. A second company, Security Industry Specialists Inc., is also named in the claim. After seeing surveillance footage from the Manhattan store, a detective working on the case concluded that the suspect “looked nothing like” Bah, the lawsuit states.

Wow, that’s a serious charge. Bah is basically saying that Apple intentionally trained the machine learning algorithm powering facial recognition so that it would link him to the thefts.The problem is, Apple doesn’t use facial recognition in its stores, according to a statement in Engadget’s article attributable to an Apple spokesperson.

[Source]