The founder of a crime intelligence platform used by major retailers including Woolworths and Bunnings says customers who have “not been involved in a crime event” have nothing to fear from the technology.
Last month, new signage outside Bunnings stores informed customers that facial and number plate recognition “may be used and images shared with police for crime prevention and safety purposes”, sparking heated debate online.
“Just a glimpse of Australia’s incoming dystopian police state,” one social media user wrote at the time.
Auror, a surveillance platform reportedly used by 40 per cent of Australian retailers, has faced questions over privacy protections, after Crikey revealed last month that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) had stopped using the technology pending a review.
The news outlet obtained freedom-of-information documents showing more than 100 AFP staff had used the widespread surveillance platform without considering the privacy implications, collecting information from retailers that wasn’t reported to police, while also inputting their own information into Auror’s systems, all without proper oversight.
But Auror founder and chief executive Phil Thomson told news.com.au that his New Zealand-based firm had been “mischaracterised” and “lumped in with different technologies”.
“We are a crime reporting platform, so after an event occurs like shoplifting or theft or fraud, a retail store worker will use this as their business tool to capture what’s happened,” he said, adding that “we aren’t cameras, we aren’t CCTV” — although those images and videos are uploaded to Auror by retailers.
While Auror’s website says it uses machine learning to aggregate data sources to investigate crimes and even “prevent crime before it happens”, Mr Thomson played down comparisons to other artificial intelligence tools such as controversial facial recognition firm Clearview.
“When we talk about preventing crime they take it to mean prediction, but what it means is allowing stores to know who’s offended in the area,” he said.
“We’re not predicting where they’re going to act, we’re just providing the information to the store network so the retailer can let other stores in the area know this crime group has just been in the area and who to look out for.”
He conceded Auror does “use some AI in data matching to help suggest if it’s the same offender to an investigator” but there was always a “human reviewing those things”.
If retailers have “got those cameras and those capabilities” such as facial recognition, “we don’t provide that but we can help provide the right alerts”.
“If that vehicle arrives back at their store, who are the people who’ve been associated with that vehicle and if they’ve used a weapon in the past,” he said.
“It changes the approach of the store manager to maybe not approach that person, if they were violent in the past.”
Cops sift through number-plates
Mr Thomson, a former privacy and intellectual property lawyer who started the company 11 years ago, insisted “privacy is really important” and Auror had been built “from a first principles privacy-by-design approach”.
He argued that Auror was more secure than traditional methods retailers used to share information and footage with investigators, such as paper reports, USBs and CDs, with secure, encrypted access to approved police and other users.
But much of the criticism of Auror centres on its use by police.
One email obtained by Crikey under FOI showed an AFP staff member asking about Auror’s automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) function. Auror monitors number-plate data in real-time and retains the information for up to two months.
On its website, the company says the platform has been designed to ensure the number-plate data is “only used in ways that directly relate to and support the purpose of providing a safe store environment, investigating incidents that occur at an organisation, and enabling the organisation to prevent crime and protect the public”.
But in an email to the AFP on December 13, 2022, an Auror employee wrote, “A vehicle does not have to be linked to a store-reported event to be searchable on Auror.”
An AFP spokesman said in a statement, “The AFP, with ACT Policing, has temporarily suspended the use of Auror until a privacy assessment has been finalised. No further comment will be made at this stage.”
Speaking on local radio, ACT Police chief Neil Gaughan said the decision was taken “out of an abundance of caution”.
“My personal view is there’s no issue with it, I’ve seen how it’s used and I think it’s a great tool to assist law enforcement,” he said.
“I might add, every other jurisdiction in the country is now on board with Auror. One of the differences we need to be clear on is it’s not Clearview, it doesn’t scrape the internet just looking for individuals. It is a repository of videos and still footage [of] people who have allegedly committed a crime. It’s retailers uploading shoplifters, basically, and we’re using it to identify these people and hold them to account.”
Asked what privacy concerns there might be, Mr Gaughan said the review would be “just making sure that the individual person’s privacy isn’t impacted to an extent that’s unfair”.
Mr Thomson told news.com.au that Auror’s collection of footage, including CCTV and number plate data, was simply what was recorded and retained by the retailers for a certain period as “standard practice”.
He said being caught in a surveillance dragnet should not be a concern for the general public.
“Not for someone who’s not been involved in a crime event,” he said.
“So again, if you were an offender they would upload the video footage of what’s occurred as evidence. Then they have their own policies around things like CCTV footage, which does capture everyone who comes in before it’s deleted.”
But he said most people in the community would be more concerned about “crime going on around you” and knowing that retailers “now have something they can do rather than chasing down and tackling someone”.
“We’re all paying for the cost of crime because retailers self-insure, so every household is probably paying up to $1000 more a year in their grocery bill,” he said.
$15 million stolen a day
Mr Thomson said contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of retail crime was highly co-ordinated and often linked to organised crime — and platforms like his were helping police catch the perpetrators.
“In Australia about $15 million a day is being stolen, it’s about $150 billion a year globally,” Mr Thomson told news.com.au
“Ten per cent of people are causing 60 per cent of the loss, and if you scale that up further [it’s 20 per cent causing 80 per cent]. The fact is those people doing more than shoplifting, they’re generally involved in gangs, guns and drugs. They’re doing this as their job.”
In streamlining and centralising retail crime reporting, one of the things Auror has been able to do is prove that in many cases “it’s the same people doing it in an organised, full-time nature, working together, usually targeting five to 10 stores”, according to Mr Thomson.
“Some people are given shopping lists — go out today and steal these things and we’ll pay you — others will only target particular items, which might be baby formula, red meat products or high-end power tools,” he said.
“It’s $1000 at a time, not stealing some sausages and bread for dinner. It’s not one tin of formula, it’s shipping off $300,000 worth overseas.”
Most crime syndicates, whether they be bikies, Asian or Middle Eastern, would “have an element or arm that is profiting from retail crime”.
“They’ll all have different methods of both stealing and then where those goods are being sold,” he said.
“Products like red meat will often stay local, be sold through the back door at restaurants, pubs and corner stores, but then non-perishable goods will be stolen from across the state, centralised in one location before being put in a shipping container.”
One of the things that surprised him when he founded the company, Mr Thomson said, was the level of violence often associated with retail crime. “Those repeat offenders are four times more likely to be violent or aggressive,” he said.
“They’re using that as a tactic. In Australian supermarkets we’ve seen tasers and broken bottles being brandished, box cutters and screwdrivers used to threaten because they know they’ll be allowed to get out of the store.”
Last week, alarming figures from tech firm Sonder showed a 35 per cent spike in police call-outs to stores including Woolworths and Big W, with assaults on retailer workers emerging as the most common reason.
Mr Thomson argued part of the problem was the “risk-reward ratio” was off for retail crime
“It’s easy to steal and if they are caught often the implications through the justice systems aren’t that great,” he said.
“If they only get caught for one thing, a couple of hundred dollars, they might be given a slap on the wrist and get off. The core thing we’re doing is helping show that person hasn’t done one thing — they’ve done 10 to 20 things.”
frank.chung@news.com.au