Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Bunnings needed to prioritise staff safety here

If you haven’t watched the Bunnings video yet showing its staff being attacked, I recommend you go and watch it - especially if you feel uneasy about the company using CCTV for facial recognition. It’s a compilation of incidents that have occurred in its stores. The first incident shows a man pulling a knife on a staff member and threatening them so he can walk out the door with two trolleys’ worth of stolen goods. That happened at the Porirua store. The next incident shows a man holding a box who runs at and knocks over a staff member, while another man behind him tries to steal a second box. That happened at the Takanini store. The incident I found hardest to watch is a man approaching a staff member at their car in a mostly empty car park. He sidles up to them, then smacks them in the head when they’re not expecting it. He then chases the staff member as they run away and trip because they are so frightened. Now, let’s be clear about what’s going on here - Bunnings is releasing this video as part of a PR campaign. It’s trying to convince us that it needs to use facial recognition technology in two of its Hamilton stores. What blows my mind is that it has to go to these lengths. It's been trialling facial recognition since 2018. It's fought its way through a tribunal process in Australia. It's had the Privacy Commissioner here, and the equivalent over the ditch, watching them. It's engaged a Māori digital sovereignty expert. It's released at least two of these video compilations. And all of this, so far in New Zealand, is just for permission to operate in two stores. Not all stores - just two. Two Hamilton stores. That’s because there are still enough people worried that Bunnings will take our biometric data and sell it, lose it or wrongly deny entry to some innocent person. I would have thought this was a slam dunk. I would have thought the answer would be: yes, absolutely - go ahead and use facial recognition if that’s what you need to do to keep your staff safe. Because sure, something might go wrong one day with the CCTV. But go and watch those videos. Things are going wrong right now. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.