Shoppers at the Chinook Centre, a mall in Calgary, Canada, have been unwittingly scanned by face recognition software.

Canadian outlet CBC reports that the mall’s parent company, Cadillac Fairview, has admitted to using the software without shopper consent, but the company claims they only collect limited data. The software has been in use since June. 

Stunningly, Cadillac Fairview never actually disclosed the surveillance, which was used at two malls in Calgary and others in Canada. A shopper simply happened to notice a window accidentally left open in one of the center’s directories. The recognition software was seemingly running the background. The shopper posted a photo of the window to Reddit. 

It doesn’t appear that the mall actually identified anyone. Face recognition usually works by scanning a person’s face, then matching that against a database of facial images. This appears to be more facial analysis, where people’s faces are scanned and, based on measurements, the people identified as male or female and sorted into certain age categories. It’s worth noting that on both gender classification and age estimates, face recognition is less accurate on women and darker skinned people. 

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