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Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

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[–] 90 points 1 month ago (10 children)

The companies that run this facial recognition should be the ones to pay first and foremost. The villains never pay themselves, we are paying victims from the taxes of the victims.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    The way these things work it's up to the City Of Fargo to, after paying $10 million to this lady, go after the supplier they hired for the facial recognition service because it was not up to claimed standards and resulted in such losses for the City Of Fargo.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    And, ideally, when the City of Fargo has to eat the cost (because the contract with the tech company likely specifies that a facial recognition match is not sufficient grounds for arrest), it and every other municipality using similar tech will change its policing practices.

    But probably the city will just quietly take responsibility for the damages after a session of contractually required private mediation, and nobody will learn a lesson.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (2 children)

    What did the facial recognition do wrong though? The cops gave them a known fake ID and asked them does this look like anybody. Well, that fake ID did look like the innocent grandma in Tennessee. (Btw the surveillance footage of the actual suspect looked nothing like the fake ID or the innocent grandma.)

    The FR service didn't do anything wrong, the cops just took what was supposed to be an alert to a possible victim of identity theft, and turned it into a false arrest and kidnapping.

    It's like if you reported a crime and you tell the cops that the victims name is Jean Smith, and then they just go arrest her and throw her in jail for six months.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Oh, I agree with you and have similar expectations on who is going to be determined to have most if not all of the blame for it.

    However the facial recognition company having to pay or not really depends on what was in the service supply contract they had with the City Of Fargo - a good contract for them can insulate them from paying even if they fucked up majorly whilst a bad contract can mean they're liable for the mistakes of others who used their system even if their system performed entirelly within expectations.

    More in general, the point I was making is that whenever one has some problem with an entity that's providing you a service (in this case it's not quite a "service", but it's similar, though this kind of thing is more commonly a situation where you're hiring a service from some company who internally chose to outsource some of the work that goes into it and who failed to abide by the contract terms they have with you), legally it's irrelevant for you if they're outsourcing some or all of the work that went wrong and if they are outsourcing work who their suppliers are, and if the failure was directly from that entity or one of the suppliers - the legal responsability towards you is that entity and if they fail then THEY are the ones who have to make amends.

    It's not up to the injured party to have to worry about whatever internal organisation, work distribution and outsourcing policies and contracts the entity which has injured has in place that have led to said injury - they fucked up, they pay, and if they fucked up because they chose to outsource some or all of the work to somebody else who fucked up, well, they can't use that as an excuse to send you in some wild goose chase after their suppliers and their suppliers' suppliers - whatever is behind their failure in abiding by the terms they have towards you is their problem not yours.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    That's fine, yes the plaintiff should sue everyone they can as good legal practice but any claim against the facial recognition vendor gets dismissed immediately because they literally did nothing wrong. They were asked who was in a picture, it was the innocent grandma who was a victim of identity theft, and the cops went ahead and just named the victim the prime suspect for no actual reason.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (2 children)

    The cops gave the software company a fake id and said "anybody look like this picture in this fake ID?". Then the software company says "yeah that picture on the fake ID looks a lot like this grandma in tennesee."

    That's on the cops 100%.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    You can't absolve the tech companies here, they know their system is fallable (is too a word, any word can be abled as such, microsoft is not the arbiter of language,) and they pretend it's not.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    I mean what did they do wrong here? They didn't tell the cops anything other than the picture of the victim of identity theft looked like the actual victim of identity theft.

    The cops are the ones who switched the victim and the suspect for no reason.

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