25
Facial recognition error: Customer misidentified by Sainsbury's
(www.bbc.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
25 points (100.0% liked)
United Kingdom
6451 readers
313 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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 / 7 = 457 errors every day
457 potentially pissed off and put off customers every day, how long is that sustainable?
Nevermind all the privacy implications of private companies having large databases of people's faces, their movements, purchases, and potential to sell or use that data for nefarious purposes, etc.