Sometime during the pandemic, Moore Wilson’s, the Wellington gourmet store I occasionally shop at, started padlocking its selection of large cuts of meat. The delicious eye fillets and rib roasts remain locked away behind a plastic shield to prevent people from stealing them.
Last week, I stopped at a Mobil gas station in Masterton to fill up and was puzzled as to why the petrol wasn’t flowing. A sign informed me that all of the pumps were now on prepay, to prevent people driving off without paying.
As a former gas station attendant, I can relate to that. Many years ago, I chased a car several hundred metres down a road in West Auckland, so angry was I that the driver had decided not to pay for the full tank of gas I’d just given him. I still remember the look of bemusement on his face when I caught up to him. He gunned the accelerator and left me behind in an oily cloud of exhaust fumes.
The pandemic, quickly followed by the cost of living crisis, triggered a sharp increase in shoplifting and abusive incidents around the country. Honest shoppers are paying for it as retailers bump up prices to cover their losses and beefed-up security.
Now, they are also looking to facial recognition technology to spot offenders earlier. Foodstuffs North Island, which runs retail stores under the New World, Pak’nSave, Four Square, Gilmours and Liquorland banners, earlier this month kicked off a six-month facial recognition trial across 25 of its stores.
Virtually every retail outlet you walk into has security cameras that record footage digitally, which is then referred to when a shoplifting incident is suspected. Facial recognition goes a step further, using artificial intelligence to search video footage for matches to facial images stored in a database.
Foodstuffs will use software to scan security camera footage in real time, trying to identify suspected offenders it has images of in its databases. A positive match could lead to security staff being alerted and the person being asked to leave the store – or the police being called.
That’s fine in principle, but there are good reasons why Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster has reservations about the facial recognition trial and is watching it like a hawk.
Facial recognition isn’t 100% accurate and overseas evidence suggests that false matches are more likely to happen for people of colour, and particularly women of colour. Webster issued a statement: “I am particularly worried about what this means for Māori, Pasifika, Indian, and Asian shoppers, especially as the software is not trained on New Zealand’s population.”
It’s also a relatively intrusive option. Biometric information, such as an image of our face, is increasingly used to verify our identity when we walk through a passport Smartgate, or unlock our phone or computer. I don’t like the idea of my biometric data being stored by a retailer and becoming a honeypot for hackers who may try to steal it to hijack my identity.
That shouldn’t happen with the Foodstuffs trial, as only images of suspected offenders will be retained for potential matching. But the first time you find out you are in the database may be when a security guard arrives to escort you from a store as a suspected shoplifter.
“I don’t want to see people incorrectly banned from their local supermarket and falsely accused,” Webster said.
The Foodstuffs trial is a good opportunity to test whether facial recognition technology can be used responsibly to reduce crime in stores, though Webster is sceptical and wants to see “hard data”. So do I. Facial recognition wouldn’t have stopped that gas station drive off 25 years ago, and it’s unlikely it would today.
