A face-matching tool used by NSW Police and created by German firm Cognitec was switched off earlier this year when concerns with its 14-year-old algorithm peaked, but similar technology will return in a capability being procured to profile suspects using features like scars and tattoos.

Although a NSW Police spokesperson declined to reveal why the facial recognition technology was paused, the decision was shortly preceded by criticism of Cognitec’s demographic bias, the publication of an audit warning NSW Police about facial recognition’s risks, and progress on the tender for a new biometric platform.

Updates not purchased since 2011

NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley revealed in answers to question from Greens MP Abigail Boyd earlier this month that the “facial recognition component within the PhotoTrac Suspect Identification [System]... uses a Cognitec algorithm”.

“In February 2025, a decision was made to disable this capability.”

Catley said “updates have not been purchased” since the Cognitec algorithm was commissioned in 2011.

In February 2024, Boyd noted that based on the US National Institute of Technology and Science’s (NIST) quarterly tests of facial recognition algorithms' accuracy and demographic bias, Cognitec was found to be more likely to “falsely identify the faces of people of colour”.

Even NIST’s tests of Cognitec’s 2024 update, which would be much more accurate than the 2011 legacy software, found it “misidentified West Africans almost seven times more often than it did Europeans”.

“Accuracy is often an issue with facial recognition as technology can be less accurate in connection with skin colour, disability etc,” an audit by the NSW AI Review Committee had warned NSW Police.

Catley said NSW Police in 2018 “internally adapted” FaceNet, an open-source facial recognition system developed by researchers affiliated with Google, and called it “NYX”.

A police spokesperson would not confirm whether FaceNet would replace Cognitec.

Expanded biometric profiling

NSW Police generated more than 1,500 leads with facial recognition for unknown suspects, victims, and missing persons in post-event reviews between July 2020 and February 2024.

This did not include people identified through real-time monitoring on live feeds.

“Prior to February this year, thousands of people have been identified for further police action by software that we know to be racially biased,” Boyd told Information Age.

Fellow Greens MP Sue Higginson, who confirmed police did not have stats on matches that led to convictions or where input photos were taken, added there was a lack of “transparency and accountability in these processes”.

“The fact that the tools they are using have been faulty and difficult to discover information about is actually a bit frightening,” she said.

Boyd said NSW Police’s reason for disabling Cognitec’s Phototrac was “deeply unclear ... was it found to be acting illegally?”

She also suggested police may have “upgraded to a new, even more invasive and concerning version of permanent surveillance”.

Boyd was told late last year that although Cognitec had not been internally “tested for bias”, NSW Police was “engaged in a procurement process for its new Integrated Biometric Platform and through that process will ensure future biometric matching software is tested for bias”.

This was the first mention of the $13 million planned replacement to Phototrac since it was first requested in 2021.

A NSW Police request for information had stated the solution would “move away from focusing solely on facial images … to provide a complete biometric profile of an offender” by integrating “fingerprints and DNA … scars, marks and tattoos, facial and object recognition” and be used not only for investigations but to “anticipate, detect and disrupt crime”.

Already, NSW Police’s Microsoft-based AI Insights platform, which crunches “CCTV … dash cam footage … geo-located mobile phone data” and other surveillance feeds, is capable of detecting “vehicles, locations … a backpack, or a tie … shoes a person of interest might be wearing” and potentially their “unique gait”.

Cognitec, meanwhile, announced in March that it had won a contract to provide biometric cameras and services to the Australian Department of Home Affairs, for use in international airports.