Anonymous by Design: Australia's Biggest Privacy Tension

The use of people counting devices often raises questions about privacy. After years of headlines about facial recognition technology in retail — most recently Bunnings' drawn-out battle with the Privacy Commissioner — those questions are landing harder than ever on procurement teams, grant reviewers, and risk committees across Australia.

Which makes it a good time to be clear about something: the right people counting software has nothing to do with any of that.

The confusion is understandable — but it's costing organisations

Not all sensing technology is the same. Facial recognition technology captures biometric data. It identifies individuals. It creates records tied to real people. That's a fundamentally different proposition to knowing that 847 people moved through a doorway between 10am and 2pm on a Tuesday.

Cohera-Tech's non-intrusive people counting technology collects visitor data anonymously. It doesn't capture images. It doesn't recognise faces. It doesn't know who you are, what you look like, or whether you've been in this space before. Instead, our technology focuses solely on detecting and counting people without collecting biometric or personally identifiable information.. That's it.

Understanding customer behaviour is a legitimate operational need — libraries need to know which spaces are underused, leisure centres manage safe occupancy, shopping centres demonstrate foot traffic to tenants. None of these use cases require knowing who anyone is. The anxiety triggered by facial recognition headlines is real, but it shouldn't block adoption of technology that was never surveillance to begin with.

Intrinsically anonymous vs. anonymised after the fact

This distinction matters enormously for risk and procurement teams. Some camera-based people counting systems claim privacy protection because they anonymise data after capture — blurring faces, deleting images post-processing. But the identifying information existed. It was captured. If the system were hacked or misused, it could be accessed.

Cohera-Tech's anonymous people counter works differently. Our overhead sensors use 3D depth mapping and thermal people counter privacy technology to detect shapes that match human dimensions, log a count, and move on. No image is ever formed. No biometric data is ever created. There is nothing to anonymise because there was nothing to capture in the first place.

This is why our technology is the right answer for organisations that need insights without exposure.

Accurate data or no data — there's no middle ground

There's another issue with low-grade sensing technology that doesn't get talked about enough: it's often just wrong. Systems that can't reliably distinguish a person from a shadow, a trolley, or a passing reflection produce counts that are off by enough to matter. If your foot traffic data sits below 90% accuracy, you're not making informed decisions about customer behaviour — you're making expensive guesses.

This is where privacy compliance and data quality are actually the same argument. Cohera-Tech's 3D depth-sensing technology doesn't just avoid capturing biometric data — it's also far better at knowing what it's actually counting. Our Swiss-made sensors deliver a minimum of 96% accuracy, with most installations hitting 98–100%.

If you're currently running an older or lower-accuracy system, it's worth knowing how straightforward switching can be.

Built for compliance, not retrofitted for it

The VemCount platform powering Cohera-Tech's anonymous data and visitor tracking software is fully GDPR compliant — meeting the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, one of the world's most rigorous privacy frameworks. No images or bio-data is captured. No footage is stored. Only logged numerical counts are encrypted and sent securely to our world class VemCount platform for reporting and analysis.

For Australian organisations, this matters beyond current legal obligation. The Privacy Act is tightening. Community expectations around surveillance are hardening. Aligning with GDPR-grade compliance now means your procurement decision is defensible today and future-proofed for whatever comes next.

When a grant reviewer or board member asks how you've ensured this technology respects privacy, the answer isn't a policy document. It's architecture. The system cannot capture what it was never built to capture.

That's anonymous by design.

Want to understand how Cohera-Tech's privacy-compliant people counting software works for your venue? Let’s have a chat