A woman who was wrongly accused of shoplifting due to an apparent mix-up with a facial recognition system was left "fuming" after being kicked out of three stores.
"I felt like socking it to them when they booted me out. I told them it was a load of cobblers." she said. "I was hopping mad"
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said:Â "No one should find themselves in this situation. The store really must avoid putting their foot in it like this. They need to tread carefully when using this powerful technology. If they don't they need a good boot up them. Imagine if the boot was on the other foot."
They said: "While commercial facial recognition technology is legal in the UK, its use must comply with strict data protection laws. Organisations must process biometric data fairly, lawfully and transparently, ensuring usage is necessary, proportionate and on a sound footing. Â And if they don't, well, rest assured, someone should definitely take steps to fix it."
image from pixabay
An individual who was born male, but transgendered to become female, has been arrested after her neighbour heard them listening to Woman’s Hour and made a police complaint.
It isn’t clear at this stage if they will be charged, or under which offence, but a BBC spokesperson told Newsbiscuit 'It should be obvious from the programme’s name that anyone who isn’t legally a woman, shouldn’t be listening to Woman's Hour.'
We asked the BBC if it had plans to broadcast a programme to cater for the interests of transgender people. A BBC spokesperson, who politely declined to say which gender they identify as, explained that the BBC had to comply with the law and its own strict equality rules. It would therefore be necessary to have separate additional programmes to cater for transgender women as well transgender men; possibly even transgender hermaphrodites. They noted that a decision has still to be made about whether a 1923 proposal for a programme called Man’s Hour can go ahead, and advised us they wouldn’t hold their breath, if they were us.
Image credit: Wix AI