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.
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.
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.