Bunnings, whose in-store facial recognition technology breached privacy laws, partnered with Victoria Police during a trial of the system.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) was heavily critical of the Bunnings system which captured the faces of every person – including children – who entered 63 Bunnings stores in Victoria and New South Wales between November 2018 and November 2021via its CCTVs.

Bunnings compared a customer’s face against a “limited database” of less than 500 banned people, working with Victoria Police to identify those individuals, reported The Australian.

The recordings of its customers is reported to have stayed within its stores, with no sensitive information uploaded to the cloud or sent to third-party processors.

The Wesfarmers-owned chain said that the sole purpose was to prevent violent crime in its stores, and it required human oversight.

It noted that its FRT system was only accessible by six “specially trained Bunnings team members who were located in a centralised location”.

“No other team members had access to the FRT,” it added.

Video explaining why Bunnings says it used FRT.

It reportedly did not automatically alert police of a threat. After it detected a customer had been banned from one of its stores for abusive, violent behaviour or committing a crime, one of those six staff members then performed a manual check to verify that it was an accurate match.

If there was no match, customer data was reported to be deleted in “0.00417 seconds”.

Kind from the OAIC noted though that deploying facial recognition technology “was the most intrusive option, disproportionately interfering with the privacy of everyone who entered its stores, not just high-risk individuals.”

Commissioner Kind noted that Bunnings “collected individuals’ sensitive information without consent, failed to take reasonable steps to notify individuals that their personal information was being collected, and did not include required information in its privacy policy.”

OAIC Commissioner Carly Kind

Bunnings has defended its use of the technology with statistics such as there being a 50 per cent increase in incidents of abuse, threats and assaults in its stores last year.

Additionally it noted that for the 12 months ending April 2024, there were about 700,000 retail crime events recorded by Australian retailers with 16 per cent of those constituting threatening or violent behaviour, and 60 per cent of store thefts are conducted by the same 10 per cent of people.