2026-08-17 12:10:13

Sainsbury’s has suspended its use of live facial recognition at one of its London stores after a customer was wrongly challenged as a suspected shoplifter.

Matt Arnold, 46, was shopping at the East Dulwich branch on August 6 when staff approached him at a self-service checkout and told him he had been flagged by the store’s facial recognition system.

Arnold said he had already scanned his purchases and used his Nectar card before waiting for an employee to approve an alcohol purchase.

Instead, he was escorted from the store.

He told BBC London: “They came over and said I had to leave. The staff member said I’d been identified by the AI, and the cameras had flagged me.”

Arnold described the experience as a “terrifying glimpse of the future”, arguing that staff risk becoming overly reliant on automated alerts.

After leaving, he said he could see a CCTV monitor displaying his face inside a red circle.

Sainsbury’s contacted Arnold the following day to apologise and said the incident was caused by human error rather than a failure of its facial recognition technology.

The supermarket has now paused the system at the store while an investigation takes place.

It has defended its wider use of Facewatch, saying the system has a 99.98 per cent accuracy rate and that every match is reviewed by a trained manager.

Facewatch also said its technology was not responsible for the incident, arguing that a correct alert had been generated but incorrectly handled by store staff.

The company said the suspension would allow additional training to take place.

The incident is not the first case of an innocent shopper being wrongly challenged by Sainsbury’s staff using Facewatch.

In February, Warren Rajah was ordered to leave a Sainsbury’s in Elephant and Castle after staff mistakenly identified him as someone flagged by the system.

Facewatch later confirmed that Rajah was not even on its database.

Similar cases have occurred at other retailers using Facewatch, with critics warning that facial recognition is spreading faster than effective regulation.

More than 100 businesses now use the technology, while Sainsbury’s has announced plans to expand its deployment to more than 200 stores.

Civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has called on Sainsbury’s to scrap the technology, accusing the retailer of treating customers “like criminals”.

Arnold questioned why the system had only been suspended at one store.

He said: “If they’re suspending it in this East Dulwich store, they are conceding there’s a problem with it. Why aren’t they suspending it in every store?”

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