Reuters pieced together how the company’s initiative evolved, how the software has been used and how a recent vendor was linked to China, drawing on thousands of pages of internal documents from Rite Aid and its suppliers, as well as direct observations during store visits by Reuters journalists and interviews with more than 40 people familiar with the systems’ deployment. ![]() “This decision was in part based on a larger industry conversation,” the company told Reuters in a statement, adding that “other large technology companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technology’s utility.” It later said all the cameras had been turned off. Last week, however, after Reuters sent its findings to the retailer, Rite Aid said it had quit using its facial recognition software. Reuters found no evidence that Rite Aid’s data was sent to China. The retailer defended the technology’s use, saying it had nothing to do with race and was intended to deter theft and protect staff and customers from violence. In telephone and email exchanges with Reuters since February, Rite Aid confirmed the existence and breadth of its facial recognition program. And for more than a year, the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government. ![]() ![]() In the hearts of New York and metro Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods, according to a Reuters analysis. Over about eight years, the American drugstore chain Rite Aid Corp quietly added facial recognition systems to 200 stores across the United States, in one of the largest rollouts of such technology among retailers in the country, a Reuters investigation found.
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