Western Australia has become the first Australian state to surveil public spaces using live facial recognition technology (FRT), and while WA Police has said the move will “increase the freedoms and the privacy of our community,” the head of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) emphatically disagrees.
“What we are talking about is a massive breach of human rights and privacy, and one which could increase in scope and scale in the absence of strong laws to limit the use of biometric technologies in public and private spaces,” EFA chair John Pane said in a 23 June statement.
“The use of real-time biometric image matching in public spaces by WA Police really is the cherry sitting on top of the surveillance state cake.”
The rollout of FRT will involve marked police vans patrolling crowded areas and large events, scanning the faces of members of the public in real time.
Under West Australian law, biometric information is protected via a public-private sector framework, which means such information – such as facial scans – requires strict consent for its collection, as well as mandatory privacy impact assessments.
The EFA, however, contends that since the new WA Information Privacy Principles won’t come into effect until July, WA Police has rolled out the new technology in an effort to avoid looming privacy regulations.
Given that consideration, the EFA is calling upon WA Police to answer several questions:
- Did WA Police consult with the WA Information Commissioner, and what was their advice?
- How is express consent being collected from members of the public?
- Has a mandatory privacy impact assessment been undertaken and published for public scrutiny?
- Have WA Police demonstrated that scanning the public’s faces is both necessary and proportionate?
- Has a human rights impact assessment been conducted?
“This is an outrageous act of police overreach and a fundamental breach of our individual and collective human and digital rights,” the EFA said.
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David Hollingworth
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.