{"id":220487,"date":"2026-01-20T11:12:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/?p=220487"},"modified":"2026-01-20T11:48:04","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:48:04","slug":"retailers-secretively-using-face-recognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/news\/privacy-technology\/retailers-secretively-using-face-recognition","title":{"rendered":"Retailers Secretively Using Face Recognition to Spot \u201cPersons of Interest\u201d \u2014 Including For the Government"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[2414],"metadata":[],"class_list":["post-220487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-free-future"],"acf":{"header_layout":"standard","header_image":220669,"mobile_header_image":null,"description":"Are Wegmans and other retailers participating in the Trump war on immigrants?","authors":[1382],"components":[{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":{"text":"Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\r\nFree Future home<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nThe grocery store chain Wegmans, among other retailers, is using face recognition on its customers \u2014 and scanning their faces for resemblance not only to accused shoplifters but also to people whose photos have been submitted to the company by law enforcement.\r\n\r\nIn response to press coverage<\/a> of the company\u2019s use of face recognition in some of its stores, Wegmans said<\/a> it uses face recognition to try to find \u201cpersons of interest,\u201d who are \u201cdetermined by our asset protection team based on incidents occurring on our property\u201d \u2014 but also, \u201con a case-by-case basis, by information from law enforcement.\u201d\r\n\r\nFace recognition is an enormously powerful surveillance and tracking technology that continues to lack broad public acceptance and legitimacy (especially when used \u201con\u201d people rather than \u201cby\u201d people for example to unlock their phone). It is unreliable, disproportionately imprecise in evaluating the faces of Black people and other groups, and has been the subject of misuse<\/a> by companies<\/a> and law enforcement<\/a> alike<\/a>, with at least 10 publicly reported cases of people, nearly all Black, suffering false arrests based on face recognition errors.\r\n\r\nAnd the incorporation of \"BOLO\" (\u201cBe On the Look Out for\u201d) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become \u2014 and may already be becoming \u2014 a powerful nationwide government surveillance dr\u00adagnet. If enough companies deploy this tech in enough stores, it could become a mass surveillance machine able to locate anyone who steps foot in a wide variety of establishments anywhere in the United States. Do we want our government to have that much power? Will we the public even have a say in the matter?\r\n\r\nThe government wants to use surveillance systems for deportation<\/b>\r\nAt the current dark moment in our nation\u2019s history, any corporate partnership with law enforcement in a mass surveillance scheme raises the question: are you facilitating the Trump Administration\u2019s trigger-happy, smash-and-grab war on immigrants? Are Wegmans or other companies running BOLO scans they receive from law enforcement for people that are wanted by federal immigration agencies, or by some of the many<\/a> local police departments that are cooperating with those agencies?\r\n\r\nThese are reasonable questions because we know of another corporate mass surveillance system that has definitely been used by the Trump immigration agencies: the driver-surveillance company<\/a> Flock. Flock runs a network of thousands of automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the nation and makes most of that data available to any local department that wants to search it. Local police departments across the nation have been discovered carrying out searches the data on behalf of the federal immigration agencies, and many towns and police departments using Flock have been very unhappy to discover that basically any police officer in the nation can secretly<\/a> hand the data on their residents over to ICE.\r\n\r\nGiven the heat that Flock is taking<\/a> around the country over its use in the ongoing deportation drive, a retailer like Wegmans would no doubt deny any involvement in that drive \u2014 but how would we know if we can believe such a claim given that companies are not being at all honest and transparent with Americans about their deployments of this tech? As we have seen, even some of America\u2019s biggest companies have bent to demands<\/a> from this lawless and vengeful administration. It\u2019s also possible that a retailer like Wegmans wouldn\u2019t even know when law enforcement BOLOs are connected to the \u201cTrump Terror\u201d deportation drive.\r\n\r\nWegmans says that they use information from law enforcement \u201cfor criminal or missing persons cases,\u201d and of course immigration enforcement is a civil not criminal matter. But in an environment where immigation enforcement is being intertwined with criminal investigations and prosecutions, can we be at all confident that will matter?\r\n\r\nWe don\u2019t know how many other retailers are using face recognition on their customers. Various indications, however, suggest the practice is at a minimum growing, and potentially already somewhat common. Those indications include claims by vendors, a handful of confirmed uses such as by Lowe\u2019s hardware stores and Madison Square Garden, and conversations I\u2019ve had with people knowledgeable about the retail sector. In New York City, where local law requires<\/a> companies to post a public notice if they are conducting biometric surveillance, several retailers<\/a> appear to be using the technology including, most prominently, Macy\u2019s, as well as some local grocery store companies. We don\u2019t know whether Macy\u2019s also does searches for the government.\r\n\r\nThe most detailed information we have about a retail face recognition system comes from an investigation<\/a> of Rite Aid drug stores by the Federal Trade Commission, which found numerous problems with the stores\u2019 program and led to a five-year ban on the use of face recognition by the company. Like Wegmans\u2019, Rite Aid\u2019s scanning for \u201cpersons of interest\u201d incorporated<\/a> law enforcement BOLO photographs as well as those accused of shoplifting by store staff.\r\n\r\nAny nationwide retailer-government BOLO infrastructure is unlikely to have yet attained the scope of Flock\u2019s driver-surveillance network \u2014 though we don\u2019t really know because of the companies\u2019 secrecy. Nevertheless, the potential for these creeping, shadowy deployments to evolve into such a network is very real.\r\n\r\nA lack of openness and honesty with customers<\/b>\r\nFace recognition is highly controversial and lacks public acceptance and legitimacy, with at least 20 cities<\/a> and 15 states<\/a> having banned or restricted its deployment by police. Perhaps that is why Wegmans, like other stores that have been asked about their use of this technology, refuses to provide much detail about its use.\r\n