If someone in Western Australia were to contract Covid-19, they are required to remain at home in quarantine for a period of seven days. The police check on their whereabouts by sending text messages and require that a selfie is sent to them within 15 minutes. The police use facial recognition and GPS tracking to make sure that the person is home. If not, they follow up with a knock on the door and a hefty fine.
The G2G app by local tech start-up Genvis has been used by over 150,000 people in the state since it came out in September 2020. The same technology has been piloted in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Australia is currently the only democracy to use facial recognition technology to aid Covid-19 containment.
San Francisco was the first city in the US to protest against police using facial recognition in May of 2019. Quickly followed by Oakland and Somerville, Amazon, IBM, and Google have declared that they will not sell facial recognition algorithms to law enforcement agencies until a federal law is put in place.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has asked for restriction on the technology until there is a law to regulate its use. Human rights campaigners argue that there is potential for personal data to be obtained and used for secondary purposes. Other groups have suggested that the use of facial recognition could lead to racial discrimination.
The pandemic created justification for the new technology, as everything went online, and organizations were scrambling to keep things together. However, the implications haven’t been thought through completely.
Consent is required before the technology can be used, and it was needed after the summer bushfires in 2020, when those who had lost identification papers used facial recognition to qualify for disaster relief payments. However, there have been numerous cases where the technology was being used covertly.
Last October 7-Eleven was found to be breaching their customers’ privacy by collecting faceprints from over a million people. It did not receive a fine, however.
Australia’s Department of Home Affairs is building a federal facial recognition database, and it appears to be ready to roll out. They began building in 2016.
A law to govern facial recognition technology was proposed but was shelved when it was found it lacked adequate privacy protections.
Facial recognition, if used wrongfully could cause many people to lose security and privacy and could be used with ill intent.
The G2G app by local tech start-up Genvis has been used by over 150,000 people in the state since it came out in September 2020. The same technology has been piloted in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Australia is currently the only democracy to use facial recognition technology to aid Covid-19 containment.
San Francisco was the first city in the US to protest against police using facial recognition in May of 2019. Quickly followed by Oakland and Somerville, Amazon, IBM, and Google have declared that they will not sell facial recognition algorithms to law enforcement agencies until a federal law is put in place.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has asked for restriction on the technology until there is a law to regulate its use. Human rights campaigners argue that there is potential for personal data to be obtained and used for secondary purposes. Other groups have suggested that the use of facial recognition could lead to racial discrimination.
The pandemic created justification for the new technology, as everything went online, and organizations were scrambling to keep things together. However, the implications haven’t been thought through completely.
Consent is required before the technology can be used, and it was needed after the summer bushfires in 2020, when those who had lost identification papers used facial recognition to qualify for disaster relief payments. However, there have been numerous cases where the technology was being used covertly.
Last October 7-Eleven was found to be breaching their customers’ privacy by collecting faceprints from over a million people. It did not receive a fine, however.
Australia’s Department of Home Affairs is building a federal facial recognition database, and it appears to be ready to roll out. They began building in 2016.
A law to govern facial recognition technology was proposed but was shelved when it was found it lacked adequate privacy protections.
Facial recognition, if used wrongfully could cause many people to lose security and privacy and could be used with ill intent.
