Griffin on Tech: Facial recognition okay, Aussie jammers, and Lords revolt on AI
HMAS Canberra made an impressive entry into Wellington Harbour this week, but the Australian warship’s visit had wireless internet providers asking where they should send the bill.
That’s because Canberra caused significant disruption to them as it cruised off the coast of the lower North Island, its powerful radar interrupting 5 gigahertz wireless services.
“Any wireless ISP with exposed coastal radios in its path would’ve felt it - with reports coming in from our friends at Inspire Net Limited in the Manawatū and TPNET NZ in Nelson confirming they were seeing the same,” wrote Matthew Harrison in a LinkedIn post.
The founder of Marlborough-based wireless internet provider Primo saw his company’s access points temporarily knocked out because radio networks are designed to prioritise radar activity. Occasionally, this causes problems around ports and airports, but it has been rarely seen on such a broad scale, causing some to wonder whether Canberra was testing some sort of radio jamming technology.
Regardless, Canberra’s crew switched to a different frequency on hearing of the disruption they were causing and the ANZAC spirit remained intact - well, almost: “Hey Royal Australian Navy… where can we send the bill?” Harrison asked.
HMAS Canberra visible from my office heading into Wellington
Foodstuffs FRT trail success
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has released the findings of its inquiry into Foodstuffs North Island’s trial of facial recognition technology that was run across some of its stores in 2024. The upshot is that the Commissioner deemed the use of facial recognition technology to comply with the Privacy Act.
While the level of privacy intrusion was considered to be high because every person who walked into a Foodstuffs store had an image of their face collected, “the privacy safeguards in the trial reduced it to an acceptable level,” the Privacy Commissioner noted.
Moreover, the trial produced evidence that suggests the use of facial recognition technology reduced crime. During the trial, 225,972,004 faces were scanned (including multiple scans of the same person) with 99.999% deleted within one minute. There were 1742 alerts, of which 1208 confirmed matches with a person in Foodstuffs’ database.
Source: Foodstuffs North Island/Office of the Privacy Commissioner
After FRT alerts were sent to staff, there were 193 shoplifting attempts, of which 120 were stopped by store staff. When it came to harmful behaviour such as physical violence or aggression, the results were similar, with 120 alerts received and 73 instances of harmful behaviour being stopped.
This is all incredibly valuable data for other retailers or any business that is currently implementing or planning on rolling out facial recognition tech.
However, the Commissioner pointed out, problems remain with FRT in general.
FRT technology has been developed overseas and lacks training data for the New Zealand population. As a result, we can’t be completely confident that the technology has fully addressed bias issues, including the potential impact on Māori and Pacific people,” he pointed out.
“This means the technology must only be used with robust operational processes, including human checks to mitigate that residual risk of bias in the decision making.”
Well done to Foodstuffs and the Privacy Commissioner for doing a deep dive on a sensitive issue. The upcoming Biometric Processing Privacy Code from the Commission will offer more useful guidance as it will cover facial recognition.
An interesting argument is playing out in the UK, where members of the House of Lords have taken a rare and admirable stand against their Government on an unlikely issue - AI and copyright.
Peers voted on Wednesday to reject plans for AI companies to be allowed to train their models using copyrighted material - a practice many of them have already undertaken without permission.
The opposition is primarily down to the work of former film director Beeban Kidron, who was able to rally support from her peers. The vocal support of Sir Elton John boosted the campaign.
“We will not back down, and we will not quietly go away. This is just the beginning,” he said before the Wednesday vote, describing the hoovering up of copyrighted material by AI companies as an “existential threat” for the creative industries.
So the UK Government now faces its legislation being shelved, or amended to ensure that, at the very least, there’s transparency demanded about what copyrighted material has been used to train large language models. That’s a small win for copyright holders which will hopefully inform the AI content debate worldwide.
Can tech save Welly?
With Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown creating a tech alliance to improve the city’s innovation capability, Wellington’s tech luminaries are also thinking about what can be done to reclaim the capital’s former glory in the tech space.
I sat down last week with Volpara Health co-founder Ralph Highnam, who created the company in Wellington in 2009 before listing it on the ASX and then seeing it acquired by a South Korean medical imaging company last year in a deal worth around $300 million.
Highnam has set up an organisation called WellyForge to encourage networking, collaboration and early investment in Wellington startups. It’s first meetup is scheduled for June 18. You can listen to my The Business of Tech podcast interview with Highnam here.
My takeaway from the chat is that the city still has a huge amount going for it, but it needs better council leadership with a strategy for how the tech ecosystem can be better leveraged for economic growth. We need more Volpara Healths!
And for some more food for thought, I recorded last week’s Vision for Wellington tech panel discussion featuring Rod Drury (Xero, Atomic), Brooke Roberts (Sharesies), Serge van Dam (serial SaaS startup investor), and Professor Stephen Cummings (Victoria University).
