Carol Myers Paid at a Sainsbury’s Self-Checkout. Then the Screen Flashed Red.

Carol Myers is an IT teacher and a law student. She had just paid at a self-checkout in a Sainsbury’s in London when the screen flashed red. An employee came over and told her she would need to be checked. Myers asked why. The employee couldn’t say.

“My face popped up on the screen,” Myers said. “Then when you pay, the system goes off and you need to get checked.”

It had also happened at a Primark in Peckham and an H&M in Brixton. “There were three white people in front of me,” she said of the H&M. “They went through, no random check. The minute I went there, it happened.” Each time, she said, staff gave her the same answer.

Myers asked how it could be random if it kept happening to her, at different shops, on different days. No one had an answer. Myers believes it was facial recognition. She took the photo at the top of this story at the Sydenham Sainsbury’s, in Lewisham. That store was one of the first two to use Facewatch, a facial recognition system, starting in September 2025. Sainsbury’s now uses it in more than 55 stores. Myers had never heard of Facewatch. She said she never saw a sign explaining the technology in any of the stores.

Asked about another shopper’s case in January, a Sainsbury’s spokesperson told Ethan Ward the Facewatch system had not wrongly identified anyone, and that a manager had approached the wrong person. Sainsbury’s says “every match is reviewed by a trained manager,” it told LBC in August.

Facewatch said its cameras compare faces at store entrances against a database of people linked to documented incidents at the stores that use it. An alert goes out only when a match passes a 99% threshold, and a trained analyst reviews it before anyone acts. When there’s no match, the comparison is deleted.

Primark, where Myers said she was first flagged, said it does not use facial recognition in its stores. H&M didn’t answer questions.

“Who are you going to be upset at,” she asked. “The machine or the store clerk? They are doing their job.” She compared it to the stop and search encounters her sons began having when they were 12. Each time, the reason was never personal. It was the system.

“You’re going into these stores, you’re spending your money, and the algorithm is randomly picking you as a Black person,” said Myers. She has mostly stopped shopping at the stores where she was flagged. Not everyone can, she said. Families rely on cheap shops like Primark and Sainsbury’s.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “Everyone looks at you. It feels like you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t.”

Carol Myers spoke with Ethan Ward for Coded Out, a podcast he produced and hosted for The Black Policy Institute in London. Sainsbury’s, Facewatch, and Primark answered his questions for that reporting; H&M didn’t respond. Sainsbury’s line on manager review is from its comments to LBC. Store details are from The Register and Retail Systems.

How we use AI