Consumer privacy advocates have responded with alarm after Coles and Woolworths confirmed they were testing facial recognition technology that they could use in their Australian supermarkets to record shoppers’ personal biometric data. The supermarket giants on Monday confirmed they had tested the technology and said they were considering installing it in their Australian stores to crack down on retail crime including aggression towards staff. Woolworths and Coles said they had not made a final decision on whether to proceed with the rollout, and neither supermarket chain would disclose which company had provided them with the software they had tested.
Dr Jason Pallant, a marketing expert at RMIT University, said the trials posed a “security versus privacy dilemma”. After an appeal by Bunnings, the tribunal reversed a 2024 ruling by the privacy commissioner that had found the hardware giant breached the privacy of store visitors by scanning and checking their faces. The tribunal agreed, however, that Bunnings had not properly notified customers that their faces were being scanned.
Facial recognition technology captures images of people’s faces from video cameras – such as CCTV footage – as a unique faceprint that is then stored and can be compared with other faceprints. Retailers may compare the faceprints against a watch list of known aggressive or banned people in an attempt to reduce violence in their stores. In addition to concerns about surveillance and the storage of personal information, facial recognition is controversial because there has been evidence of misuse and that people of colour are more likely to be incorrectly identified than white people.
Tom Sulston, the head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, said facial recognition was “wildly inaccurate”. Sulston said he was also concerned shoppers at Woolworths and Coles wouldn’t be able to control the way their biometric data was used. Dr Luke Munn, a research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies, said he was concerned the technology could be used beyond its initial stated purpose.
If Woolworths and Coles use facial recognition technology in their stores, this would follow the recent installation of anti-theft gates and self-service checkouts, which were a technological replacement for human staff. Munn said the major supermarkets had a history of “using technology to fix problems which creates more problems”.
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