I just wanted to share something I didn’t know until today. I was in Tesco at the self checkout and noticed that Saturday staff were being less customer focused than usual. There were three of them next to my checkout having a gossip and ignoring customers waving at them for help.
Anyway, the main reason this is of interest is that they were gossiping about a colleague and how she was told off for not wearing her bodycam.
Now hearing that rang an alarm in my head. I spoke to another member of staff and she said that most of the big supermarkets are now doing this for the safety of staff. I looked in Sainsbury and sure enough they wear a cam on a lanyard. Looking online it seems that they may have been wearing these devices since about 2020.
Am I the only one that didn’t know?
Apparently it’s not illegal to wear a cam but there are various GDPR regulations and you need a licence (apparently)
I’m wondering whether they now have cameras in the toilets too. It seems that you cannot move without being filmed or listened to by some device or other. With AI you can be tracked and monitored with facial recognition so there will be a dossier on every single citizen.
Azz I was just surprised that this has been kept so quiet. I can’t even see much about it in news reports. when I asked the lady I spoke to she said it wasn’t switched on. Which makes no sense.
Bunnings has just won a case before the Administrative Review Tribunal over its use of AI and cameras in store
The Administrative Review Tribunal has found that Bunnings was reasonably entitled to use AI facial recognition technology to combat crime and staff abuse in its stores.
The hardware giant did not breach privacy laws in scanning customers’ faces, but could have done more to notify them of the data collection, the tribunal said.
Australia’s Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind determined in 2024 that Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning hundreds of thousands of customers’ faces without their proper consent. The Tribunal has reversed that decision.
Gary Mortimer, a professor of retail and consumer behaviour at the Queensland University of Technology, said he supported the administrative tribunal’s ruling.
“It’s incumbent on retailers to not just keep their workers safe, but also other customers safe, and also protect their inventory from loss and theft,” he said.
“They should be looking at alternative ways to do that and using high-tech, innovative technology, computer vision [and] AI systems is the way of the future.”
