Coles, Woolworths trial facial recognition tech amid retail crime wave
Australia's two largest supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, are trialing facial recognition technology in their stores, citing an increase in retail crime as the driver.
Why this matters: Every shopper who walks into a Coles or Woolworths could now have their face scanned and checked against a database, without being told, without consenting, and without having done anything wrong. That is a significant shift. Retail crime is real, but it does not automatically justify running biometric surveillance on millions of ordinary people buying groceries. The harder question is what happens to that data, how long it is kept, and whether innocent people end up flagged or misidentified. Australia has weak federal privacy protections around biometrics. That gap matters here.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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