Foodstuffs’ facial recognition survey results inconsistent with existing research

A recent survey conducted on behalf of Foodstuffs North Island suggests that the new Zealand public is accepting of facial recognition cameras in retail, but something’s not adding up, writes chief editor Nicholas Dynon.

Foodstuffs North Island Limited has claimed its six-month trial of facial recognition camera technology a success. According to Foodstuffs, an “independent evaluation” has found “the benefits outweigh the risks”, with “strong public support” for use of the technology.

Foodstuffs commenced a six month trial of FRT across 25 of its New World and Pak’n Save supermarkets in February. Citing historically high rates of retail crime and customer-initiated violence across its stores, Foodstuffs looked to the tech’s ability to identify persons of interest from among shoppers entering its stores.

FRT has been hailed internationally as offering gamechanging security, safety, efficiency and profitability benefits, but the technology has also been the subject of significant controversies over privacy, accuracy, racial bias, and concerns over the ‘chilling effect’ of over-surveillance and the loss of practical obscurity.

As part of its trial, the supermarket cooperative commissioned a survey to gauge how “New Zealand consumers feel about the use of facial recognition (FR) in retail settings”, claiming that 66% of respondents were accepting of the use of FRT, “even if the impact it has on reducing harm from incidents of retail crime is minimal.”

Conducted on behalf of Foodstuffs by branding and consumer insights consultancy One Picture, the survey of 1,007 New Zealand consumers aged over 18 found that 66% of respondents said they will accept FRT even if the harm minimisation is very small, 79% would accept it even if it only achieved a 0.7% reduction in harm, 86% would accept it if it achieved a 3% reduction in harm, and a staggering 89% would accept FRT if it achieved a 10% reduction in harm.

Impressive numbers. But they fly in the face of established international data on FRT public acceptability published in several peer-reviewed survey-based academic research studies. In the US, for example, which typically has relatively higher rates of public comfort with FRT, recent studies indicate that the acceptability of FRT in retail sits at between 54% and 59%.

The results also appear wildly inconsistent with a biennial privacy survey of 1,200 New Zealanders released by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on 13 May this year.

In that survey, 49% of respondents stated that they were concerned or very concerned about the use of facial recognition technology in retail stores to identify individuals. 22% were neutral on the topic, 25% were either not concerned or not really concerned, and 11% were unsure.

Public acceptance of FRT is a sliding scale FRT is controversial in some scenarios but widely accepted in others. FRT deployments in retail stores, for example, seem to frequently result in media controversy, while most of us are happy to have our facial images captured at airport passport control.

Many of us are comfortable using the technology to unlock our smart phones, yet we’re not so comfortable about its use in monitoring public spaces.

The international research on FRT public acceptability, demonstrates that some deployments of FRT are more publicly acceptable than others. The research highlights that there are clear patterns to acceptability depending on the purpose of deployment and – importantly – whether the operator is a government agency, law enforcement, a business, or individual.

In a recently published paper in Massey University’s National Security Journal , I collated 200 data points from over a dozen international research studies to ‘map’ the public acceptability of a range of FRT deployments.

Broadly speaking, the research tells us that public acceptability of individuals’ operation of FRT on their own device, such as unlocking their smartphone, is associated with low levels of perceived risk (they trust themselves) and often high levels of perceived reward (they derive direct benefit from it, such as convenience).

By contrast, government agencies’ operation of FRT is associated with mixed levels of perceived risk (it depends on what it’s being used for, and how) and perceived reward (there is perceived direct (personal) benefit in certain use cases, such as passing quickly through airport border checks, and perceived indirect (public) benefit in others, such as fighting crime and thwarting terrorists.

Lastly, private companies’ –including retailers’ – operation of FRT tends to be associated with relatively higher levels of risk, and often lower levels of perceived reward for surveilled individuals.

Individual use of FRT

FRT acceptability data confirms that individuals tend to place trust in the facial recognition technology on their own smart phones. According to a 2024 survey, 68.8% of Australians are comfortable with using facial recognition to unlock their smartphone.

Such statistics that may seem somewhat counterintuitive considering that many of these users may report feeling less comfortable about – or even object to – the idea of having their facial image recorded by a public-facing camera.

But, as the data suggests, when an individual uses facial recognition technology on their own phone they feel in control – even though they may in fact have little control over how their facial data is being used and who it may end with.

Beyond device unlocking, other individual uses of FRT are associated with lower levels of acceptability.

According to a 2016 UK study, 31% of respondents were comfortable with the idea of using FRT to bid in online auctions, and only 24% regarded using FRT for contributing to online forums as acceptable.

Commonly cited perceptions of convenience and proportionality are relevant here. Using one’s face to unlock one’s device is considered a convenient alternative to unlocking via password or even finger scan. The idea of having to provide one’s biometric in order to comment in an online forum, however, is viewed as a disproportionately intrusive measure of little perceived benefit to the user.

Government use of FRT

Just like individual use of facial recognition technology, the research tells us that public acceptance of government use of RFT varies greatly depending on the purpose for which it is being used. There are a few reasons for this:

Familiarity: The rule of thumb that the more familiar people are with a particular technology the higher their level of acceptance of it tends to hold true in relation to FRT.

The research data tells us, for example, that people tend to be relatively comfortable with the now commonplace use of facial recognition for identifying passengers at airport customs (76% according to a 2020 Australian study). When it comes to less familiar deployments, such as identifying voters at polling places, it’s a different story (47% according to a 2022 US study).

Proportionality: People generally accept the use of facial recognition technology by police to identify terrorists and investigate serious crimes (over 80% in US, UK and Australia, according to one study) but are resistant to it being used to identify minor offences and antisocial behaviours, such as traffic violations (51%) and parking violations and littering (33% according to the abovementioned 2020 survey).

Specificity: The more ambiguous the use of the technology is, the greater the degree of discomfort around it. Deployments such as “monitoring crowds as they walk down the street” (31%) and “ day-to-day policing ” (41.69%) lead to concerns over ubiquitous surveillance and the loss of “practical obscurity”.

Private sector use of FRT

A key finding of the research data is that people are generally less accepting of FRT cameras when they are operated by private sector organisations. In short, people place little trust in businesses’ ability to operate the technology responsibly or to the benefit of the public.

The use of FRT by retailers to identify known shoplifters and antisocial patrons, for example, is considered no more acceptable by the public that the idea of its use by police to identify minor offenders or traffic rule breakers.

That being said, the public is more accepting of retailers’ use of FRT to identify shoplifters, antisocial patrons and fraudsters than it is of its use by retailers for other purposes –such as loyalty programs, advertising

(15.7% according to a 2024 Australian survey), payments and the tracking of customer behaviour (7% in the UK, 2019).

The public acceptability of FRT operation by businesses in other contexts echoes the patterns we see in the retail setting. In gaming venues, for example, the use of facial recognition for age verification or to identify self-excluded gamblers is more accepted than its use in identifying VIP gamblers for customer experience or marketing purposes.

That being said, the available data indicates that the public tends to be generally more accepting of FRT in gaming than it is of FRT in retail. But that doesn’t mean that FRT in gaming is uncontroversial.

Risk and Reward

Ultimately, the data tells us that public acceptance of FRT tends to involve a range of trade-offs between risks and rewards

Individuals may be willing to accept the risks involved with providing their facial data to an FRT operator where they perceive a potential (i) direct benefit, such as greater convenience, faster service, or privileged access to a restricted area, or (ii) indirect (public) benefit, such as safer international borders, safeguarding of national security, or a decrease in serious crime.

Whereas the use of FRT by police to investigate crime may be seen as ‘rewarding’ in terms of delivering a public benefit, the use of FRT by private businesses – even when it is purportedly for the purpose of crime prevention – tends to be seen as self-serving and holding little or no reward to those being surveilled.

In addition to the rewards, the risk calculus is heavily influenced by who the operator is, and what they are using the technology for. Private businesses are generally perceived as ‘riskier’ FRT operators compared to government. Additionally, less familiar, less specific, and less proportionate uses of the technology are perceived as relatively risky.

Social licence for FRT yet to be established

The approximately 200 data points I collated from the US, UK, and Australian research provide a clear picture of deployment-specific FRT public acceptability within and among those jurisdictions, which are of indicative value for acceptability modelling in the New Zealand context.

To date, however, survey data of an academic standard is yet to be produced in relation to FRT public acceptability among New Zealanders. This is significant given that the data – even between politically and socially proximate countries (such as the UK, US, and Australia) does differ and that in New Zealand issues such as Maori data sovereignty hold critical local importance.

Despite noting this absence, an extensive 2020 New Zealand Law Foundation report on FRT in New Zealand comments that the views of the public constitute a potential constraint on the expansion of surveillance through FRT.

Indeed, in a 2021 article promoting the report, co-author Associate Professor Nessa Lynch of Victoria University of Wellington comments that the “role of public opinion on matters like this is massive”. The report raises the relevance of ‘social licence’, the idea that a practice that lies outside general norms should be subject to societal acceptance.

A clearly established relationship exists between social acceptability and social licence, and this is relevant to FRT (and biometric technologies generally). Yet the major FRT-related research and policy documents produced in New Zealand to date –including those by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, NZ Police, research institutions, and others –are yet to incorporate empirical local acceptability data into their findings.

Understanding how various FRT deployment scenarios are perceived by New Zealanders would be useful in identifying how local perceptions differ from those in the jurisdictions covered by the existing international research, and in establishing an evidence basis for discussing social licence and developing legislative and policy-driven safeguards.

The aforementioned biennial privacy survey of New Zealanders by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner goes a little way in this regard, but as a survey on privacy concerns that fall within the OPC’s Privacy Act remit it affords limited attention to FRT specifically.

The recent public consultation conducted by the OPC on an exposure draft of a biometrics code of practice is another recent example of eliciting public perceptions, but again it is not FRT deploymentspecific, and nor does it engage directly with issues of acceptability.

Although it purports to reveal “how New Zealand consumers feel about the use of facial recognition (FR) in retail settings”, the recently released results of Foodstuffs’ survey of 1,007 New Zealanders raises more questions than it answers. Its methodology and design are not matters of public record, and nor does the survey appear to have been the subject of academic peer review.

In the absence of objective published research on FRT public acceptability in New Zealand, the academics who inform policy, vested interests and lobbyists who seek to influence it, and officials who formulate it, are left to draw their conclusions largely from foreign data and foreign guardrail precedents. They do so without first having empirically established either the existence of social licence for it or the range of scenarios that social licence might cover.