Australia’s Plan for Facial Recognition Database Rings Privacy Alarms

In Australia, if the citizens' driver's license (DL) photo or passport photo has been taken in the past few years, the face of that person is expected to end up in a massive new countrywide network the federal government is trying to create.

The Victoria and Tasmania regions have already started to upload DL details to the database of state. This database will be eventually linked to a future national one.

The Legislation will enable government agencies and private businesses to access facial identities held by state and territory traffic authorities and foreign affairs department held passport photos.

It has been estimated by the home affairs department that the cost of ID fraud per year is $2.2 billion. The department also stated that introducing a facial component to the document verification service of government would help prevent it. This service is already used by 100 government agencies and 700 businesses.

Additionally, alongside the document verification service, a facial recognition service for enforcement of the law would be introduced. Almost every state and territory governments have updated their driver's license laws in anticipation of the database. According to the Council of Australian Governments, people getting passports, sign a form that confirms that their photographs will be used for biometric matching purposes.

Alarming Concerns

According to privacy experts, the new legislation lacks proportionality. They believe that the benefits do not outdo the intrusion into people's privacy.

According to the Australian Privacy Foundation, the proposal is highly invasive as the system could be integrated into a number of other systems that gather visual data, including closed-circuit television.

The foundation says, "We are on our way to automated and real-time surveillance of public spaces."

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, facial recognition technology remains unreliable.

Additionally, the human rights commissioner, Edward Santow, told the parliamentary inquiry, "If inaccurate information received from the use of this technology is used by law enforcement, it could also have drastic consequences for the person concerned, including being arbitrarily detained and having fundamental features of their right to a fair trial compromised."

The Human Rights Law Centre reported that a separate facial recognition technology – NEC Neoface employed by federal agencies and some state and territory police, hasn't gone through verification and testing process for accuracy on different ethnic groups which can lead to disproportionate rates of misidentification of ethnic minorities.

However, the home affairs department affirmed that it conducts testing and tuning of facial recognition software. Subsequently, its matching results will be reviewed by trained facial recognition experts to prevent false matches. The department adds, "In other words, decisions that serve to identify a person will never be made by technology alone."

The department stated that the concerns regarding mass surveillance are not warranted due to the lack of practicality. According to them, the systems are not designed for it. They are nowhere near the resources that would be needed to conduct a mass surveillance program. The system for law enforcement needs an individual to manually submit an image and resolve against possible matches, and it creates an audit trail.

Although CCTV still images can be used into a system to identify someone yet it is not technically possible to live stream CCTV footage into the system.

According to Kristine Klugman, the president of Civil Liberties Australia, told the committee it could happen soon and said, "Indeed, it is only a matter of time before the combination of cloud services, mobile, high-definition video capture (including smartphones) and 'big data' analytics will make such real-time surveillance possible, cheap and enticing. When that happens, we can again expect to hear similar claims that our police and spy agencies 'are only effective if they have the tools necessary to effectively enforce the law and detect and prevent threats to the Australian community."