Big Coles Is Watching You and Collecting Information While You’re Shopping  

The early 2024 announcement that Coles Supermarkets Australia was entering into a three-year contract with Palantir Technologies to incorporate its data integration and artificial intelligence platforms into its operations was jarring, as has been its more recent rollout of CCTV cameras into aisles to surveil customers, as a simple trip to the shops is now turning into an Orwellian shakedown.

Coles has incorporated Palantir’s 2015-launched Foundry platform. This is a data system the CIA-fostered company has built for private entities. This meant that “10 billion rows of data” from 840 Coles stores was being integrated. And the odd aspect to a retail giant taking up with Palantir is that the US data company has a reputation for developing spying, military and policing agency systems.

But the retail giant hasn’t just partnered with an entity whose purpose is to gather increasing data on individuals to create new understandings, as Coles is also trialling in-aisle motion sensor cameras in its stores, which are surveillance devices that detect criminal behaviour, like theft and shoplifting, and if it does consider a customer is acting in this manner, a voice from above calls them out on it.

A customer described her experience of the new instore surveillance system to Yahoo News after she’d been called out by the voice. The woman who was reading information on the back of a box heard it from above telling her that she was being filmed and when looking up she saw herself being displayed in real time on a screen, with a red square framing her body to identify her.

Indeed, with Coles having taken up with Palantir, the understanding is that the retail giant is collecting customer data so that it can be used by it and other companies for future marketing and planning and while the new CCTV system doesn’t appear related, it would be foolish to assume that information collected by these cameras is not being incorporated into the broader data system.

Big Coles is watching you

“Coles will leverage Palantir platforms, including the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), across its store operations to better understand and address workforce-related spend,” Palantir explained in a 2 January 2024 press release. “By integrating data into one system, Coles will connect its C-Suite to the shelf-edge in stores across its more than 840 supermarkets.”

Matt Swindells, Coles chief operating officer, said at the time that his company was “excited by the capability the Foundry platform brings to rapidly leverage beyond dashboards, and provide a suite of tools utilising AI to our frontline teams”, and he added that this “will allow them to respond more dynamically to ever-changing trading conditions and customer need”.

But Palantir doesn’t just have a reputation for building data integration systems that can improve the efficiency of government departments and private companies, but further it is known for its capacity to increasingly break down the barriers between different information systems in order to incorporate them and create new data points.

Since Coles shifted to using Palantir technologies, constituents have been raising concerns about how these AI data systems might be collecting data about customers’ buying habits, their banking details and how much cash they might be spending at the register. And while this sort of data may not appear so important, it’s this data that is often the most valuable type that big tech is hoarding.

So, as Coles continues to insist that it is collecting data to improve its all-round customer shopping experience, the supermarket chain has quietly been collecting it on its customers for over two years now. And customers have no way of knowing how this data might be being used, and once a company like Coles incorporates a new system like Palantir’s Foundry, it becomes reliant on it.

An AI-driven data integration panopticon

Palantir was founded circa 2004 by US tech investor Peter Thiel, at a time when US Congress had blocked a Pentagon initiative to build a post-9/11 all-pervasive surveillance system. CIA venture capital nonprofit In-Q-Tel was Palantir’s first investor besides Thiel. The company’s only client until 2008 was the CIA, and the spying agency’s staff helped the tech company hone its systems.

Thiel is also a Trump White House insider, and this has led to numerous US government departments using Palantir systems. Besides Foundry, the main platform for military, intelligence and law enforcement is Gotham, whilst ImmigrationOS has been developed by Palantir to assist the Trump administration in its mass deportation drive of undocumented migrants.

US president Donald Trump signed a 20 March 2025 executive order that sought to remove the barriers between data silos, or unique databases, so they can be incorporated, and through this merging of information new data points can be produced. The White House is understood to have already utilised hundreds of freshly produced data points.

Spain last month ordered that state-controlled and private entities end contracts with Palantir, due to concerns about how classified information is being used and threats to national security. This followed similar recent developments in France and Germany, which saw their spying agencies drop Palantir due to national sovereignty issues and instead turned to French data company ChapsVision.

However, Australian government and private entities have increasingly been steaming ahead with Palantir integration. The Australian Defence Force, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Agency, AUSTRAC, and the Australian Signals Directorate all use Palantir products. But there are no clear regulations around how Palantir might be using the data it gathers here and storing it.

All-seeing aisles

Coles announced it was going to start incorporating high-tech security systems into its stores back in September 2023. This included overhead cameras, AI-enhanced cameras and smart gates that lock automatically if someone attempts to shoplift. And at certain stores today, staff may be wearing body-worn video cameras in the shopping isles.

Coles has been trialling these technologies since 2023, but they’re being significantly expanded at present, which is why more people are becoming concerned about the ever-growing levels of surveillance. And more customers are beginning to realise that whilst they’re standing in the shopping aisles new data is being generated via their movements.

Coles is understood not to be collecting biometric data on its customers. But a scandal did break a few years back, which involved hardware chain Bunnings biometrically scanning its customers to prevent theft. And incidentally, the Trump White House has asked Australia to handover all its citizens’ biometric data to be stored in order to facilitate the US Visa Waiver Program.

“They have brought it out… so that we can have a more secure shopping experience,” explained Western Sydney academic Dr Joanne Orlando, in regard to the increasing cameras in Coles last month. “But what no one is saying is the huge impact all this surveillance is actually having on us and society. Many people feel like they are not trusted anywhere they go.”

“It’s a huge amount of data that is being collected from us. We don’t even know what is being collected, where it is going, who’s got it and what they’re going to do with it,” the academic who specialises in these technologies continued, and she added that it’s getting increasingly difficult to opt out of these systems, as even if one stops shopping at Coles, other stores will soon follow suit.