At stores that sign up to use Auror’s new system, everyone who enters will have a temporary biometric template made of them. Photo / 123rf
By Phil Pennington of RNZ
The number plate-spotting company at the heart of a Court of Appeal challenge is now offering facial recognition inside shops.
At stores that sign up to use Auror’s new system, everyone who enters will have a temporary biometric template made of them.
The system would check the template against the store’s own list of risky people, via facial recognition software provided by a third undisclosed company.
If no match is found, the template is immediately dumped, according to Auror’s website, about the new Subject Recognition system.
“It cannot in any way be used for profiling, prediction, tracking, monitoring behaviour or targeted marketing purposes,” it said.
Auror already has automated number-plate recognition (ANPR) technology widely spread across the country. Briscoes, Mitre 10, Woolworths and Z Energy, among others, use it, according to the website.
Facial recognition technology is more controversial, as it captures and compares your face (called a biometric).
The Government has backed a push by big retailers to use it much more, following a “cautious tick” from the privacy commissioner in June, after Foodstuffs ran a trial of facial recognition.
Auror met Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith twice in December 2024 and last month to talk about facial recognition technology and “pragmatic policy interventions NZ could look at to help prevent and tackle crime”, according to internal documents RNZ obtained under the Official Information Act.
Auror’s non-facial recognition systems are already the leading generator of volume (including retail) crime to police 10-12,000 retail crime reports per month to police.
Goldsmith earlier ordered a rapid and secret review of whether the Privacy Act posed barriers to facial recognition. His office said there was no decisions yet on facial recognition.
Earlier, he said he met a range of stakeholders about work programmes.
Auror’s facial offering was revealed around the same time a legal challenge against the use of its number-plate tech reached a new height.
This week, lawyers for three appellants asked the Court of Appeal in Wellington to denounce how the police used the tech without much control (no need for a warrant or production order).
Police tap into Auror’s ANPR system about 700 times a day - 3-4 times more than several years ago - for a host of different types of crime investigation, not just retail.
About the time police first partnered with Auror in 2015, they stated, “ANPR ought to be viewed as a forerunner to the wider use of other CCTV platform options such as facial recognition”.
Auror previously said it did not use facial recognition. This changed because the technology was now 99%-plus accurate at identifying people and because retail crime was becoming more violent, it said.
“Auror Subject Recognition integrates with best-in-class facial recognition technology (FRT) to detect high-harm and prolific persons of interest (POI),” its website said.
“It allows retailers to combine FRT with their information about past serious offending, which is safeguarded to prohibit the collection of sensitive characteristics, and can only be used for crime prevention and safety purposes.”
The biometric template of a shopper was not stored either by the retailer or by Auror, and was only in the third-party FRT provider’s system, it said.
If the tech made a match of someone’s face at a shop, this would give staff a “really critical moment’s notice, so that they can respond better and keep themselves safe”, Auror told ZB.
Who gets on a list from which a match would be made?
“Identification is based on past in-store offending that meet the retailer’s criteria for high-harm and prolific offending,” Auror said. “Retailers cannot manually or arbitrarily enroll any profile to the POI list.”
Police and other retailers would not get a look in.
“Importantly, law enforcement cannot access the Subject Recognition module or POI lists, and retailers cannot share this information with other retailers or law enforcement users of Auror.”
The software enables CCTV cameras, either inside or outside shops, to become facial recognition or ANPR cameras.
The appeal court heard how police use Auror’s number-plate system for much more than retail crime, to disrupt gangs, for instance.
Auror raised $82m last year in a funding round led by US taser and bodycam maker Axon. Auror then formed a partnership with Axon.
Police use Axon tasers and store evidence, including from family violence, on Axon’s evidence.com system.
RNZ asked Auror to name what FRT provider it would use.
“We don’t believe there is a binary choice between privacy and safety,” Auror co-founder and chief executive Phil Thomson said..
“We are transparent about this work to design the technology in the right way, with the right safeguards and transparency tools.
“Auror is on a global mission, alongside our partners, to reduce violent retail crime by 50% in the next five years, and we believe Subject Recognition will be a key part of this.”
- RNZ