A Florida man was arrested after police treated a face-recognition result as a lead strong enough to help carry a warrant. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and reported by WIRED, Robert Dillon lived over 300 miles from the Jacksonville Beach McDonald's where a man had allegedly tried to lure a child. A police system called FACES returned a 93 percent facial match from a poor image taken off surveillance footage. That number measured similarity between images. It did not say the two faces belonged to the same person.

The damage came from the institution around the software. License plate searches reportedly placed Dillon's vehicles nowhere near the county, a restaurant manager said the suspect was a regular customer, and six months passed before the warrant was submitted. The arrest still happened. Dillon was taken from his home, spent a night in jail, pledged his truck title for bond, lost work during crab season, and watched his mug shot remain online after charges were dropped. The machine supplied a resemblance, then the paperwork gave it weight. In cases like this, the face becomes a shortcut through doubt, and the person has to spend months proving that a score was only a score.