Okay, do you want to hear something straight out of the "you would have been better off just saying absolutely nothing" file? This one's from the Privacy Commissioner.

Michael Webster has warned small retailers, such as dairies, about putting up "walls of shame" featuring people they say have shoplifted from them. You know the ones. You go into the dairy and there's a mood board of dodgy-looking people in trackies, snapped by CCTV, usually stuck up on a wall or window close to the counter.

The Privacy Commissioner has warned that this can cause the named individuals serious embarrassment, emotional distress and reputational harm, especially if the retailer is not 100% sure they actually shoplifted. The consequences can be particularly serious for children and young people and there can also be tikanga Māori considerations because of the tapu associated with the human body and, of course, any tattoos on that body.

Webster has some advice for retailers. Good questions businesses can ask before displaying someone's image are: Do you know who it is? Do you have their permission? Are they identifiable? Is it fair to post it? Will it embarrass or hurt them?

Now, far be it from me to tell the Privacy Commissioner how to do their job but I suspect there are more deserving victims of privacy breaches to go into bat for than the people on a dairy's wall of shame.

My sympathies in this case actually lie with the dairy owners because I think we all know that putting up a wall of shame is an act of desperation. It's done because nothing else is working.

Calling the police doesn't work. You'll remember that, for one hot minute, officers were reportedly told not to attend shoplifting incidents involving less than $500. Threatening the shoplifter doesn't work. How many times have we read about people simply filling up their trolleys and walking out? Holding a shoplifter on the ground is a pretty risky thing to do.

So really, the only thing left for these owners to do is put up photos, often simply to remind themselves what the offenders look like in case they come back again.

These dairy owners cannot afford the kind of facial recognition technology that Bunnings can, right? This is the sort of technology that stores a shoplifter's face in a database and triggers an alert when old mate waltzes back in. These guys have to rely on a printer, a bit of Sellotape, and their own memories.

Privacy is the last thing anyone is likely to be worried about in a scenario where someone has stolen from a dairy owner.

Sticking up for shoplifters is definitely an inside-your-own-head conversation, not one for sharing with the rest of us.

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