Image: Take3
You walk into a store for ordinary purchases. The receipt is the only record you expect to leave. In a growing number of retail locations that assumption no longer holds. Advocacy group Fight for the Future maintains a Ban Facial Recognition scorecard that attempts to track which major U.S. retailers use, might use, or have ruled out facial recognition technology. The list itself carries a warning: it “may be out of date.” Positions change. Retailers dispute their placement. The technology continues to expand.
Confirmed or Consistently Listed as Using
Across the scorecard and independent reporting, Macy’s appears most consistently in the “using” category. When pressed in earlier reporting, the company declined to commit to ending the practice. Lowe’s, Albertsons, and Ace Hardware have also appeared in the “using” column in multiple summaries, though some later issued denials. These designations remain fluid. Treating any single snapshot as permanent would misrepresent how quickly retailer policies shift.
Walmart has been listed in both the “using” and “won’t use” categories across different sources. That conflict is left unresolved here because no current, definitive public confirmation settles it.
Retailers That Have Publicly Refused
A clearer set of companies has gone on record against the technology. Target, Costco, CVS, Dollar Tree, Home Depot, Kroger, and Verizon have made public commitments not to deploy facial recognition. Additional companies listed as refusing include Gap Inc., REI Co-op, Petco, PetSmart, Sonos, and Burlington. These statements provide the strongest available signal that biometric face scanning is not part of their current operations.
The Gray Zone of Silence
The largest and most consequential group is the one that has neither confirmed use nor issued a clear refusal. Walgreens, McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Starbucks, Publix, Aldi, Dollar General, Shoprite, and Ross sit in this category according to summaries of the scorecard. Nordstrom, Dillard’s, and Staples also provided no definitive answer at the time of the underlying reporting.
Silence functions as a reservation of rights. It leaves the door open for future deployment without public commitment or customer notice beyond whatever minimal legal requirements apply in a given jurisdiction.
Federal Action Already Taken
The Rite Aid case illustrates the endpoint of inadequate safeguards. In December 2023 the Federal Trade Commission banned the chain from using AI facial recognition for five years after finding the company deployed the technology without reasonable procedures to prevent harm. False matches disproportionately affected certain demographic groups. The enforcement action stands as the clearest federal signal that private retail biometric systems can produce concrete consumer injury when deployed without rigorous controls.
Fight for the Future has pointed to the Rite Aid outcome as a warning for other retailers still operating without public commitments. The scorecard remains a moving target. Checking the current version at the group’s site is the practical first step. Treating a retailer’s non-answer as its own form of answer is the second. Biometric data, once collected, cannot be changed the way a compromised credit card can. The receipt ends at the door. The face scan may not.
