Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition technology for five years after the Federal Trade Commission alleged that the company’s surveillance system misidentified customers as potential shoplifters.

The ban came as a settlement was reached Wednesday between the government agency and the drugstore chain.

From October 2012 to July 2020, Rite Aid used facial recognition technology to identify shoppers that “it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior,” the FTC said in a federal court complaint.

But because of low-quality images that came from security cameras or employee phone cameras, thousands of shoppers were wrongly identified as shoplifters, the agency said. It added that store employees would follow customers they believed to be involved in theft and order them to leave or threaten to call the police.

At other times, employees would accuse people in front of their friends and family, according to the complaint. In one incident, store employees searched an 11-year-old girl, the FTC said.

The agency said that Black, Asian and Latino shoppers were especially likely to be misidentified as potential shoplifters, as were women.

“Rite Aid’s reckless use of facial surveillance systems left its customers facing humiliation and other harms, and its order violations put consumers’ sensitive information at risk,” Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release.

In a statement Tuesday, Rite Aid said that it disagreed with the allegations but was “pleased to reach an agreement with the FTC and put this matter behind us.”