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Resources and learning

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Rule 4 examples

A woman with short, curly hair flips through a notebook while browsing in a retail store. These scenarios are examples of how an agency might apply rule 4 in context.

Use of FRT in retail store to operate a watchlist

A retail store intends to use FRT to identify individuals on a watchlist to help improve staff and customer safety.

Applying rule 4

It would not be fair for the retail store to use techniques such as web scraping to obtain images of people from news sites who may have committed crimes and pre-emptively enrol the web-scraped images into the store’s FRT watchlist. This would also likely breach other rules in the Code, such as rule 1. However, it would likely be lawful, fair and not unreasonably intrusive to use stills from the store’s CCTV system to enrol the individuals into the FRT watchlist, provided the rest of the Code was complied with when doing so.

The retail store would also need to consider where the cameras were physically located. For example, if there was a camera at the entrance of the store, it would be important to ensure the camera did not capture unnecessary images of people (e.g. people walking nearby but not entering the store). Similarly, if the store had changing rooms, bathrooms or any other sensitive area, it would be important to ensure no sensitive images were being captured.

A person's hands rest on the top of a steering wheel of a bus or large vehicle. It is dark outside and lights on the dashboard are glowing. Attention monitoring in employment context for safety

A long-distance trucking business is considering implementing a biometric-based fatigue and attention monitoring system for its drivers to ensure driver safety.

Applying rule 4

The business recognises that continuous monitoring of employees while they are working is highly invasive. To comply with rule 4, they decide on a policy that presents the minimal level of invasiveness, such as setting the system to only record video not audio and turning the system off when the vehicle is not on. Video footage will only be reviewed by the employer if the driver has been involved in an incident and the driver is provided with a copy of all data the system sends to the employer.

Rule 10 would also be particularly relevant to this scenario.

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