Professor Emmeline Taylor joins Colin Peacock to explore how retailers around the world are deploying live facial recognition and what it takes to get it right when it comes to reducing losses while maintaining privacy.
They break the conversation into three areas.
Firstly, organisational readiness: why deploying facial recognition in retail is not about flicking a switch, and why it can take years to align policies, training, data protection and governance across as many as twelve different principles.
Secondly, the business case: one retailer reported a 20% reduction in shrink, but regulators are pushing back on some use cases and insisting the technology is proportionate to legitimate purposes such as violence reduction and in-store safety, not just financial ROI.
Thirdly, sustainable deployment: how retailers can maintain public trust through transparency, clear signage, and holding the line on minimum standards.
They also discuss watch list management, the risk of surveillance creep, the distinction between live and retrospective facial recognition, and why the parallels with early CCTV adoption suggest this technology will become the norm within a generation.
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