The hardware and garden centre chain where customers are always wrong

Who knew that going to buy a hose, a wheelbarrow, a fern or Christmas lights was a trip to a dystopian Australia few knew existed?

But Big Brother Bunnings has been watching you and given us a glimpse of the future that is here and now. Between 2018 and 2021, the household hardware and garden centre chain took the data of customers’ faces and compared them against a database of individuals the company had deemed a potential risk due to past crime or violent behaviour.

CCTV footage of Bunnings staff being attacked.

Now the Privacy Commissioner has determined that the standard business practices of Wesfarmer’s home improvement business, that the customer is always a wrong’un, has breached the privacy of hundreds of thousands of customers using facial recognition technology (FRT).

The Privacy Commissioner investigation found Bunnings had used CCTV cameras to capture the face of every person who entered 63 stores in Victoria and NSW between November 2018 and November 2021, collecting sensitive information without customer consent. The Privacy Act classes facial images and other biometric information as sensitive information and affords a high level of privacy protection, including that consent is generally required for it to be collected.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said Bunnings had failed to comply with the Privacy Act and ordered the company to not repeat or continue the practices and destroy all the information collected via the facial recognition system. The company was not fined.

Seemingly unchastened, Bunnings said it would seek a review of the privacy commissioner’s determination, arguing the technology’s use appropriately balanced privacy with the need to protect staff against violent and organised crime.

Bunnings managing director Mike Schneider made the somewhat extraordinary claim that his company knows that about 70 per cent of incidents are caused by the same group of people and while they could be physically banned it was virtually impossible to enforce their exclusions. “We believe that in the context of the privacy laws, if we protect even one person from injury or trauma in our stores the use of FRT has been justifiable,” he said.

To hear Schneider tell it, Bunnings has become a war zone. He said stores that participated in the trial had seen a clear reduction in violent incidents. But abuse, threats and assaults, he said, had increased by 50 per cent in Bunnings stores in the last year alone.

There is no doubt that shoplifting is not merely a nuisance but can be a significant threat to both businesses’ vitality and the safety of staff and consumers. But at a time when the cost of living crisis has eroded old civilities and created new urgencies, the meagre staff now left by many companies to tend to customers and tills is surely an open invitation to abuse and theft.

The lesson to be drawn from Bunnings’ misguided belief that all customers are potential crooks until their technology proves innocence is that people will want and expect to be asked to give consent to their faces being captured and used. Other companies take note.

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