Retail big Kmart breached Australians’ privateness by scanning customers’ faces with out consent, Australia’s privateness commissioner has dominated.
Between June 2020 and July 2022, Kmart put in facial recognition cameras in 28 shops to fight refund fraud.
Every buyer who entered – not simply suspected fraudsters – had their biometric information captured.
Kmart breached clients’ privateness by scanning their faces with out consent, the privateness commissioner has discovered.Credit: Bloomberg
Privacy commissioner Carly Kind stated that after a three-year investigation, she discovered the observe was “a disproportionate interference with privateness.”
“I don’t think about that the respondent (Kmart) may have fairly believed that the advantages of the facial recognition know-how system in addressing refund fraud proportionately outweighed the impression on people’ privateness,” she stated in an announcement.
“[It was] additionally minimal with respect to [Kmart’s] annual income, which was $9.2 billion within the 2020 monetary yr.”
Kmart argued it was entitled to make use of the know-how beneath a Privacy Act exemption for tackling illegal exercise, however Kind rejected that defence, concluding the gathering of biometric data from 1000’s of harmless clients was unjustified.
Kmart was contacted for remark. The firm co-operated with the investigation and stopped working the system in July 2022.
Kmart has been ordered to not repeat the observe sooner or later, and must publish an announcement on its web site inside 30 days explaining its use of facial recognition know-how and the regulator’s discovering in opposition to it.
This is the second time the regulator has dominated in opposition to facial recognition in retail, following a comparable discovering in opposition to Bunnings final yr, a call that’s presently beneath overview by the Administrative Review Tribunal.
