Kiota.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
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Securities software used widely by retail staff, as in the Spotlight. After an incident involving a former Green MP Goalriz Gutaman quick Politics last year after being caught shoplifting from boutique fashion stores, and news emerged earlier this month suggesting she had done it again at a Pack and Save supermarket. But the former MP did not steal anything and the
store never reported the case to the police. Yet as the incident was logged in the aura's security system, police were able to access it and attempted to use it in the court case against gutamann.
Enzed Heralden.
You're writer David Fisher has been looking into the case and the scope of AURA software and joins us now on the front Page.
David, can you.
Give us an overview of what happened between Guaman and the staff at the Royal Oak Pack and Save last year.
So on October twelve last year, the day before Gora's Garriman was due to appeal her sentence for shoplifting at the High Court, she was at the Pack and Save Supermarket in Royal Oak doing some shopping, and as she was walking about the store, she was placing items in her shopping trolley and also into a tote bag.
Sitting in a shopping trolley.
When I'd say tote bag, I mean one of these ubiquitous not plastic any more type bags that we will take shopping or carthouse shopping around and stop both store security she was asked to empty her bags and she did that. At that stage, she wasn't near the checkout, she hadn't approached the checkout. She was still going about doing her shopping. Security staff appear to be concerned about the manner in which she was doing her shopping and
that led to them asking her to empty her bags. Now, what we know happened after that is that the security staff used a platform called Aura through which to enter details of what they considered to be a retail crime incident.
What it does is it links retailers details get entered into the system of retail crime incident and it allows retailers to match incident with incident so that it improves the level of knowledge and the picture that they have across the retail space as to what crimes occurring there. They also have an option to report it to police so that it then becomes visible to police, Which is not to say that police don't have visibility across the AURA platform anyway.
They do.
Auras styles their partnership of New Zealand Police is one of partnership, and I have a contract between AURA and New Zealand Police that talks about how close that partnership is. It includes having New Zealand Police talk to other companies or other police forces about the benefits of the AURA platform. So it was Goras Garaman's details, including a name being entered into this crime platform, that then came to the attention of police the day after her appeal court hearing
October fourteen. Police have told us there were officers going through the huge number of reports that are made from retailers and among those reports was the one that was
ident find involving garment. What I understand happened at that point is that those officers or that officer that was going through the shoplifting reports then alerted the detective senior sergeant who was overseeing the inquiry into garam and shoplifting from hogh End retail stores and as a result of that officer becoming aware of it, he sought to raise it with the High Court as a matter that should be considered as part of a appeal, but he was
unsuccessful in doing so. Garaman was also unsuccessful in her appeal. So those are the events that we understand took place. And as we've seen over the last week or so, this blew up again. But if chatter going around found its way out through Auckland restauranteur Leo Malloy and a bit of chat on a social media a little red blog site as well, which brought it to the public attention. And here we are a week down the track with a lot of people with a lot of questions about
what AURA does. Here's the question, how much access do police have and can they look at everything or any camera anytime any shop in New Zealand that is using AURA.
No, they can't, So I think you know, we aren't cameras, We're not a surveillance system. Quite simply, retailers choose to make the crimes that they witness in their stores visible to police and then it's up to police to determine how they use it information to investigate further and solve more crime. So it's a way for to provide information,
including evidence like video, to police more efficiently. It's we're just modernizing what's always happened, but rather than paper files and USB sticks, we're making it digital much faster for both sides.
Yeah, so she's not been charged, has she?
So despite nothing really happening in this case was filed in the Aura software used by food Stuffs which owns pack and say, can you explain what Aura actually is? It's a New Zealand based company, right, that's right?
Or is an incredible New Zealand success story.
Actually it launched in twenty twelve with the idea that it would create a platform that would link retailers. One of its pictures that I've said, talk about or seen executives that the company talk about is that their technology removes anonymity, and it does so by logging incidents of retail crime concern and storing them in a database. It's
got incredible capabilities or as network. They're always very quick to say that they don't do live facial recognition, but they do have a facial recognition capability within their system.
I understand.
But information is also logged about what people wear, what tattoos they might have, other distinctive characterizing features. Names can be included. One of the capabilities that AURA has is automatic number plate recognition. It will also log all of those details. So when you drive into a supermarket car park, your number plate has been captured, it can be tracked as to where it's been in other areas that also are covered by the URA network. And remember that's ninety
percent or more of New Zealand retail spaces. So a very very powerful tool, and it can link through that automatic license plate recognition the individuals that are associated with
that vehicle and who their accomplices might be. So you get this extraordinary picture of who the individuals are that are plaguing supermarkets or drive offs at petrol stations, or all the issues that retailers face when the criminal element decides that they able to parasite on their good work and have something for nothing.
What about privacy though, fesh I see there's been some concerns over number plate scanning and privacy issues in Australia for example.
Yes, concerns in Australia and concerns here too. Privacy for a system like AURA was always going to increase as it went on. The longer it goes on, the better its systems get, the more information it harvests, the more places it harvests information from, and the better it gets at matching that information, or is stated aim of taking anonymity away as a real red flag for those that
do have these privacy concerns. You know, we need to remember here too that this is a network that created for retailer's purposes, but is also.
Used to a huge degree by police.
We know that in the past police have misused the system when we were subject to COVID lockdowns. You may recall that there was a hunt on for women that were believed to have breached the border in and headed into North and I did some reporting around that and discovered that police had invented crimes so as to access or of systems in ways that they would not have been able to so that they could track those women.
We know, then, from the subsequent police audit that was done as a result of the discovery that police misused the system, that it wasn't the only time that.
Police had misused the system. The guardrails that have been put in place around police using the system were all so horribly inadequate. There'd be no real privacy assessment that had been done or enacted. And that was the Australian experience as well. The Australian Federal Police had signed on and worked to exploit the system without having carried out
any sort of a privacy assessment. And this is a real concern when we have a really strongly diminishing private space in the country, that we have systems and networks
like this become increasingly powerful. I'd remember a conversation I had with somebody who worked for one our intelligence agencies, and that individual had said to me, with a real hunger in their voice, if only we could get access to what Google has, And they had said to me, private surveillance is something that should be a far greater
concern to the public than government surveillance. Now, of course they would say that I have a view, having covered a number of intelligence agency breaches, that we should always be concerned about what the government's doing with our information.
But it's a good point.
Private companies have a high degree of freedom when it comes to developing and implementing these types of systems.
It's an issue.
Which has been picked up by the officer of the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand. They currently have work underway on what's called a biometric code and what they mean by a biometric code is a set of rules for anyone that's gathering identifying information about an individual. That can be information is simp as having CCTV of how people walk, and if you're using how people walk as a means to track them through multiple CCTV cameras, that makes a
biometric information. That's the sort of information that the Privacy Commissioner is looking at putting some pretty strict rules around.
An AORA spokesperson said Australian Federal Police carried out a full privacy assessment of AURA in twenty twenty three, which gave them comfort to continue using the software. AURA is committed to empowering retailers and law enforcement to improve public safety and keep our community safe. Or are frequently engages with regulators and has done so for more than a decade. AURA will continue to work with a New Zealand Privacy commission.
It sounds like this technology is what is one of those instances where our information and our likeness and the way we walk and our faces are being captured and we just have to trust in the authorities that it's not going to be used for nefarious purposes. Do you think that there are enough of those kind of balances in place for it not to fall into the wrong hands.
Well, it's always difficult when you're talking about private companies because we have a degree of oversight of how government agency responds through the way that we cast our votes, the decisions that government ministers will make, and the things that government agencies will put in place, And there's a general public good.
That lies underneath that.
For private companies, and I'm not talking about or specifically here, companies would very much like to do things that are in the public good, but making money is what they're there for. You know, they have to return some form of benefit to their investors, and so the normal rules don't necessarily apply. There are systems in place like the Office of the Prison they commissioner to say to these needs, Hey, we have a privacy law. We'd like to run a ruler over you as to how you comply with it.
But technology increases a pace. The development that happens within companies like Aura that also happens at a rapid pace, and regulators need to work really really hard to keep up with that and quite possibly need more funding, need more resource, need more.
Expertise to do that.
I asked the Privacy Commissioner and Police about a year ago, do you know how many cameras are connected to the AURA system?
Neither of them.
The police have now done a privacy assessment around their interaction with AURA, or they've had AURA do their privacy assessment.
I dare say things have changed a huge amount since when that was done and where we are now to have the AURA system covering ninety percent of New Zealand retail spaces over the course of really only be going for about ten years or so, it's an incredible advance and I would argue that every incremental increase in the ability to surveil the public really gives you a new set of metrics that you need to apply to the
rules that we have in place for our society. It's ninety percent here in New Zealand, fifty percent of Australian retail places covered and booming success in America's Don't get me wrong. From a startup perspective, this company has done incredibly well. Twenty twenty one, they were valued around thirty million dollars. The Australian Financial Review last year valued them
around five hundred million dollars. That's a meteoric rise. And making sure that you're doing all the things that you need to do during a incredible surge of growth like that happening, that's a difficult thing for a company.
To get a handle on.
I'd like to see them be more directly open with the public about what they're gathering and what they're doing with it. I'd like to see a government more proactive in letting people know things like, for example, you can go to NZTA and you can say I don't want my name and address associated with my license plate for companies like Ora to have access to there's a degree of choice that the public has about how much we buy or buy out of this, but there is not
much information there to make the public aware. We need far far more assertive regulation from the regulator, far more information coming out to the public, and we need Ora to be proactively more engaging with the public around this and really police, you know, police will be the ones I would think out of any agency that makes the
greatest use of this technology. We need from police a huge amount of openness around how this is being used and police right from the outset of discussions that I've had that other media have had with them around their use of AURA have not been anywhere near as open as they should have been.
Thanks for joining us, David, Thanks Chelsea.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.