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His office visited 10 stores, interviewed staff and reviewed the trial data. The Commissioner concluded that the system was an effective way to reduce serious repeat offending during the trial. Scarlatti, an evaluator that Foodstuffs commissioned, compared the trial stores with 128 stores without the technology. It estimated a 16% reduction in serious harmful behavior and a 21% reduction in shoplifting. The Commissioner noted that the stores were not chosen at random and that reporting differed between the groups. The report counts nine misidentifications among 1,735 alerts, two of which harmed the people involved. The report states that the algorithm was trained on groups in Australia that include Māori and Pacific people.","category":"aggregate result","unexpected":false,"purpose":"Imagus built the FRT System to match faces seen by cameras with a database of enrolled images in real time. 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Cameras compared shoppers' faces with each store's watchlist of people who had committed serious harmful behavior there, and two trained staff were to verify each alert. New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner ran a parallel inquiry and released its report on 4 June 2025. His office visited 10 stores, interviewed staff and reviewed the trial data. The Commissioner concluded that the system was an effective way to reduce serious repeat offending during the trial. Scarlatti, an evaluator that Foodstuffs commissioned, compared the trial stores with 128 stores without the technology. It estimated a 16% reduction in serious harmful behavior and a 21% reduction in shoplifting. The Commissioner noted that the stores were not chosen at random and that reporting differed between the groups. The report counts nine misidentifications among 1,735 alerts, two of which harmed the people involved. 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