Hacker News Reader

Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Security filming is common in Australia and not outlawed by this ruling. It is specifically the non-discriminate use of facial recognition technology this ruling applies to.

The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.

The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:

> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?

https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/blog/is-there-a-place-for-facia...

View on HN

I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.

Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?

Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...

I don’t understand it either, but it’s just one thing she said she will consider. No idea how much of a factor it is.

It's a false equivalence to equate humans (even "super-recognizers") with a computer when it comes to matching large quantities of faces with names/PII.

At some point the numbers get big enough that you wouldn't be able to get the pictures of faces in front of the people who would recognize them fast enough.

In the KMart case, it would not have been interpreted differently if people were doing the facial recognition rather than a computer. The issue was indiscriminate use on everyone who walked in, without permission or proper notification. Which is only cost effective if automated, and a technology of convenience I guess.

But is a non-indiscriminate, privacy friendly solution possible? The problem is people walking in with a valid receipt for a purchased item, grabbing a matching item off the shelf, and wandering over to the returns counter and requesting their money back. The usual solution most shops use is locating the returns counter past the security controls (checkout counter). But more and more of these types of stores are putting their service counters in the middle of the store for some reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com