It uses facial recognition ergo a computer flagged her face as similar to the face of someone known to be banned from the store. This tech is known not to be good enough for this use case. If you match a large population of users you are going to get an unacceptable level of false positives.

Even putting a human being in the loop is trouble prone because people aren't on average good enough at this.

It would be more useful to require a free membership to shop there and validate allowed users via bluetooth and ban users devices and phone numbers.

> How did they know she shoplifted in the first place?

She didn't.

UK does not have ID cards and you do not have to carry ID. Also they may not have ID for the shoplifters often they are just pictures from cctv.

Seems like they're trying to match against known people and it has false positives.

> they could have just checked this person's ID

If random store employees start walking up to people and asking them to show ID, is that an acceptable state for society?

It seems slightly more acceptable than kicking someone out of the store due to mistaken identity.

It is at Costco /s

But note that this is the UK. Different issues from the States (where this wouldn't ever pass. We have weak social security specifically becsuse citizens rejected a national ID).

There isn’t any national ID in the UK either.