What is recorded
- What happened: the type of incident, a short description, the shop, the time and an estimated value.
- Appearance only: clothing, build, age range. Never a name or a guess at one.
- Vehicles: registration, make, model and colour where relevant.
- Photos of goods or the scene, taken by shop staff, who are told not to photograph faces.
- Whether the shop reported the incident to the Gardaí, and the PULSE reference if it did.
What is never recorded
- Names of suspects. There is no field for one.
- Facial recognition or any other matching of people.
- A “known shoplifter” list, or anything that decides who may come into the centre.
- Profiles of people that build up over time. Repeat descriptions are worked out from the week’s records and are never stored against a person.
CCTV stills: the one exception
Centre security and management can attach a CCTV still to an incident for a Garda file. Shop staff can never see, list or link to it. A still is never used to match people across incidents, and it is deleted with the incident.
How long it is kept
Ninety days. After that an ordinary incident is deleted automatically, photos, descriptions and vehicle details included. An incident the centre keeps on file for a Garda complaint is held for 24 months and then deleted the same way. Deletion runs every night on a schedule, not on request. A weekly brief is not a stored copy: it is rebuilt from the live record each time it is opened, so an incident that has been deleted is gone from old briefs too.
Who can see what
- Shop staff log for their own shop only and see their own centre’s feed.
- Centre security and management see the whole centre, and are the only ones who can resolve, keep on file or delete.
- The Garda liaison receives the weekly brief by private link.
- A retailer’s head office, if it has asked for access, sees its own stores’ entries: read-only, without photos or CCTV.
- No centre can see another centre’s data. That is enforced by row-level security in the database, not just hidden in the interface.
Why not a group chat?
Many centres already warn each other in a messaging group. A group chat has no delete date and no access list: every message and photo stays on every phone that ever joined, including the phones of people who have since left. Group chats also drift, quickly, into naming people and sharing faces.
Lookout is the same instinct, telling the other shops, with a delete date, a list of who can see it, and rules that keep names and faces out.
Where it runs and what comes with it
Incident records and files are hosted in the EU (Ireland). A DPIA, a tenant data-processing agreement and a plain-English privacy notice are being prepared and reviewed, and will be provided before go-live. Lookout is built and operated by Paul Blanche (sole trader), who is the processor.
This page describes how the software works. It is not legal advice, and each centre confirms its own position with its own adviser.