Face recognition

On September 15, 2026, Angela Lipps filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Fargo and Detective Lucas Heck, seeking $10 million in damages. The complaint alleges Heck relied on a flawed facial recognition match and ignored exculpatory evidence to bring bank fraud charges, leading to her arrest at gunpoint and detention for nearly six months. The charges were dismissed in December 2025 after bank records showed she was in Tennessee during the thefts. The suit says Fargo lacked policies governing facial recognition use at the time.

Craig Harriman filed a third lawsuit in Aroostook County Superior Court against the town of Houlton, Maine, alleging officials have not released public data from surveillance cameras removed earlier in 2026. The filing follows multiple Freedom of Access Act requests and two previous court appeals. Harriman seeks the immediate production of remaining records, including emails about the town’s facial recognition video surveillance system, and written explanations for any withheld documents. The town previously depleted its legal budget in 2025 handling FOAA lawsuits.

Bloomington, Minnesota, settled a wrongful-arrest lawsuit brought by Kylese Perryman, who spent five days in jail after police incorrectly identified him as a suspect in a 2021 robbery and carjacking investigation. The agreement resolves remaining claims against the city and requires changes to how Bloomington alerts other law enforcement agencies about suspects; Perryman will receive a payment under the settlement. Hennepin County separately paid Perryman $10,000 in 2024. Charges were dismissed 52 days after his arrest, following five days in jail and 30 days on electronic home monitoring. The ACLU of Minnesota represented Perryman. The lawsuit alleged that police treated the facial recognition software result as an identification without completing basic corroborating work, despite evidence such as home surveillance footage and the absence of tattoos on the person recorded at Walmart.

Amazon Web Services was added as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by Christopher Gatlin, who spent 17 months in jail after St. Louis police used Amazon Rekognition on a grainy, blurry image of a masked suspect. The amended complaint, filed August 13, 2026, alleges poor police work, inadequate training, misconduct and a defective facial recognition system. AWS said its terms of service prohibit police use of Rekognition’s face comparison feature in criminal investigations.

In March 2026, Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski told reporters that the department identified ‘a couple of errors’ in an investigation into bank thefts that led to the wrongful arrest of Angela Lipps. West Fargo police used AI facial recognition to identify Lipps based on a photo from a fake ID used by the suspect. Zibolski said use of the West Fargo AI facial recognition system would not have been allowed and has since been prohibited. He said the department would take ‘more steps’ and ‘more scrutiny’ in future cases.

404 Media reported that at least 60 of Flock Safety’s AI-enabled Condor cameras were exposed to the open internet, allowing anyone to watch live feeds, download 30 days of video archives, and change settings without any password or login. The exposed cameras included views of playgrounds and parking lots. Flock Safety said the flaw was a limited misconfiguration on a small number of devices and has since been remedied. The affected Condor Live cameras are not the same model as the license-plate reader cameras used by San Francisco and Oakland police.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement began a contract worth up to $9.2 million with Clearview AI for facial recognition on Sept. 5, days before launching its ‘Midway Blitz’ enforcement operation in the Chicago area. Illinois law enforcement agencies are barred from using Clearview because of a BIPA settlement, but the ban does not apply to federal agencies. The contract is the largest among nearly $10 million in federal contracts with Clearview, which also include deals with the FBI, U.S. Marshals, Army, and Customs and Border Protection. No federal law governs the technology’s use.

In July 2025, US marshals arrested Angela Lipps at her home in Tennessee while she was babysitting. She was held for nearly four months without bail, then extradited to North Dakota and charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information and four counts of theft. The charges were dropped after her lawyer provided bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the fraud. The complaint alleges a Fargo police investigator used AI facial recognition software that returned Lipps’s social media photo as a lead. The detective requested an arrest warrant despite Lipps not resembling the suspect and having never been to North Dakota. The lawsuit seeks $10m in damages.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto’s office agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by Randal Quran Reid, who was jailed for six days in 2022 after a facial recognition match wrongly identified him. The payout was approved at a May 13 hearing in federal court in New Orleans and sealed. Reid’s arrest stemmed from a warrant that relied on a Clearview AI match that JPSO detectives failed to verify. JPSO rescinded the warrants after Reid’s attorney pointed out physical differences. The settlement does not include an admission of fault.

In May 2025, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a federal civil rights suit by Randal Reid, with the payment finalized in federal court in New Orleans. Reid was stopped by DeKalb County police outside Atlanta the day after Thanksgiving 2022 on warrants from Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes accusing him of using stolen credit cards to buy about $15,000 in designer purses. He had never been to Louisiana and spent six days in jail before the warrants were withdrawn. According to the suit, the sole basis for identifying him was a Clearview AI facial-recognition match run by a sheriff’s detective; the office had awarded Clearview a $25,000 contract in 2019. The arrest affidavit did not mention facial recognition, citing only ‘a credible source.’ The suit alleged the office had no formal policy or training on the technology despite using it since at least 2019.

On March 20, 2025 U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in the Northern District of Illinois granted final approval to a nationwide class settlement of consolidated Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and other state-law claims against Clearview AI, which built a database of tens of billions of face images scraped from social media and other websites. Rather than a cash fund, the class receives a 23 percent equity stake in the company, valued at about $51.75 million on an agreed $225 million company valuation as of January 2024, with an option to take 17 percent of revenue through September 2027 instead. The value is contingent on the class being able to monetize the stake. The deal followed the ACLU’s separate 2022 Illinois consent order barring Clearview from selling its database to private entities nationwide and to any Illinois entity, including police, for five years. European regulators have separately fined the company, including a €30.5 million Dutch penalty announced September 3, 2024.

A New Jersey man agreed to a $300,000 settlement of his federal lawsuit after being wrongly imprisoned for 10 days due to a facial recognition misidentification. The suit concerned the Woodbridge police department’s use of facial recognition technology. Attorney Sexton compared the department’s handling to early GPS users who drove off a cliff, saying, ‘It was like this magic thing. You’re kind of bewitched by the technology.’

On June 28, 2024 the City of Detroit and Robert Williams formalized a settlement of Williams v. City of Detroit, the ACLU-backed suit over his January 2020 arrest. Detroit police had matched his driver’s licence photo to security video of a 2018 shoplifting at a Shinola store; he was arrested outside his home in front of his family and held for about 30 hours. His case was the first publicly reported wrongful arrest attributed to a false face-recognition match. The city agreed to pay $300,000. Under the court-enforceable agreement, Detroit police may no longer arrest anyone solely on a face-recognition result or on a photo lineup built from one; a match may serve only as a lead requiring independent corroboration. The department must also review cases from 2017 to 2023 in which the technology was used and notify prosecutors of any arrest made without independent evidence. The ACLU called it the strongest police policy on the technology in the country.

On November 25, 2022, an officer with the DeKalb County Police Department pulled over Randal Quran Reid and took him into custody based on an arrest warrant from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. The warrant had been issued on July 18, 2022, after Deputy Andrew Bartholomew used facial recognition technology to incorrectly identify Reid as a theft suspect. Reid was held for six days without bond. The warrant was recalled on November 30, 2022, after officers noticed a mole on Reid’s face that the purse thief did not have.

On this date, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Robert Williams, described as the first US person wrongfully arrested based on facial recognition. Williams was arrested in 2019 after a facial recognition system matched a grainy security image to his driver’s license photo. Police showed a photo lineup to a security guard who had not witnessed the shoplifting, and the guard selected Williams. He spent 30 hours in detention. The prosecutor’s office later apologized. The lawsuit alleges police used unreliable facial recognition despite known racial bias. A second man, Michael Oliver, sued last year.

The American Civil Liberties Union and partners sued Clearview AI in Cook County on May 28, 2020, alleging the facial recognition firm violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The suit aims to protect survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Chicago police confirmed the same day that the department no longer uses Clearview’s software. CPD spokesman Howard Ludwig said Clearview terminated the $49,875 contract on May 1 and issued a prorated refund. The department’s contract with another facial recognition firm remains intact.

On May 3, 2020, Reno Police Department used DataWorks Plus facial recognition software to match a surveillance photo to an innocent individual, resulting in a wrongful arrest. Officers relied on the algorithmic match without independent corroboration to secure an arrest warrant. Criminal charges were later dropped. The City of Reno settled the resulting civil rights lawsuit for $100,000 and agreed to policy changes requiring independent corroborating evidence before facial recognition matches can be used as probable cause.

The Raleigh Police Department halted its use of Clearview AI facial recognition software, six months after paying $2,500 for a one-year subscription. The department said it stopped after Clearview failed to respond satisfactorily to questions. The department’s policy restricts facial recognition to public-domain images, but Clearview scrapes social media. The ACLU said the software raises privacy concerns and disputed its accuracy claims. The department said it is reviewing its policies and does not intend to resume use.

In June 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection subcontractor Perceptics was breached in what CBP called a malicious cyberattack. Images of travellers’ faces and license plates, contracting documents and other data were made publicly available on the internet. About 184,000 traveller images from CBP’s facial-recognition pilot were compromised, and at least 19 were posted to the dark web. The attackers also obtained contractual documents, program-management documents, emails, system configurations, schematics and implementation documentation related to CBP license-plate-reader programs. Perceptics had downloaded sensitive CBP data from an unencrypted device and transferred it to the company’s network, violating DHS security requirements. Perceptics was suspended from federal contracts, subcontracts, grants and loans in June 2019; the suspension was lifted in September 2019. A September 2020 DHS Inspector General report found CBP did not adequately safeguard the data, though no federal networks were compromised.