POLICE — G2G NOW
1065. Hon NICK GOIRAN to the minister representing the
Minister for Police:
I
refer to the minister's answer to my question without notice 865 on 27
October 2021, revealing that facial recognition technology is being used
by the G2G Now application.
(1) Why has the
government rejected recommendation 20 of the Australian Human Rights Commission's
recently tabled Human rights and technology final report (2021),
which states —
Until the legislation �
Regulating the use of facial
recognition and other biometric technology —
comes
into effect, Australia's federal, state and territory governments
should introduce a moratorium on the
use of facial recognition and other biometric technology in decision making
that has a legal, or similarly significant, effect for individuals, or
where there is a high risk to human rights, such as in policing and law
enforcement?
(2) In the
absence of such legislation or a moratorium, will the minister table the
policy, guideline or similar document that governs how the facial recognition
data is being used and stored?
Hon STEPHEN DAWSON
replied:
I thank the honourable member for
some notice of this question. The following information has been provided to me
by the Minister for Police. The Western Australia Police Force advises as
follows.
(1)–(2) Chapter
9 of the Human rights and technology final report (2021) reports
on biometric surveillance, facial recognition and privacy. Recommendation 20
emanates from this chapter and highlights concerns about comparing certain facial images against a dataset
of images for the purpose of identification. The G2G Now system does not compare an image across such a dataset
of images and instead provides only a facial match capacity against an
image supplied by the individual. As this is a match against a known image,
supplied by the traveller, it is not a facial recognition process as considered
in the Human rights and technology final report.