NY Teenager Sues Apple For One BIIILLLIIOONNN Dollars For Using Facial Recognition To Arrest Him For Robbing Apple Stores In Boston While He Was At Prom In Manhattan

ENGADGET – An 18-year-old from New York has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Apple over a false arrest he says happened because of what he believes to be Apple’s face recognition system. NYPD officers arrested Ousmane Bah on November 29th after he was falsely linked to a series of Apple Store thefts in Boston, New Jersey, Delaware and Manhattan. Apparently, the real perpetrator used a stolen ID that had his name, address and other personal information. However, since the ID didn’t have a photo, the lawsuit claims Apple programmed its stores’ face recognition system to associate the real thief’s face with Bah’s details. However, An Apple spokesperson told Engadget that the company does not use facial recognition in its stores.

A detective that eventually examined Apple’s surveillance footage after the arrest determined that the real Bah didn’t look anything like the thief. Further, Bah was attending his senior prom in Manhattan when the Boston theft, where $1,200 worth of goods were stolen, took place. It’s an odd case, and it’s not entirely clear if it will hold up in court.

As New York Post notes, the lawsuit argues that 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.”

The downside to all this crazy newfangled technology that is slowly taking over our lives: upcoming robot wars, automation leading to mass job loss,  human apocalypse.

But the bright side?

Most of this shit isn’t even close to working correctly or even close to correctly.

Self-driving cars are driving off cliffs, robots are getting fired from supermarkets for not even being able to sell sausage, now Apple facial recognition is so bad it got an arrest embarrassingly wrong:

A detective that eventually examined Apple’s surveillance footage after the arrest determined that the real Bah didn’t look anything like the thief.

Now this kid not only got drunk and laid at prom (probably), he gets to follow it up with a $1 billion lawsuit against Apple and try to get rich quick.  All he had to do was deal with a little inconvenient police investigation that was quickly proven false by some dumbass robot software.

PS,

That Fabio the Robot blog I linked is one of my favorite blogs ever.