Western Australia police will soon become the first law enforcement agency in Australia to deploy live facial recognition technology in what privacy advocates have labelled an “outrageous overreach”.

The WA Police Force plans to trial a marked police van outside major events and in crowded public areas, scanning people as they walk past.

The technology will compare live images with a database of individuals with outstanding arrest warrants, registered child sex offenders and missing persons.

The live images will be matched with a database of 4,000 people.

If a match is detected, the live image will be kept and an alert will be sent to nearby police officers who will confirm the individual’s identity.

While a number of police forces around the country already use facial recognition technologies to analyse already obtained footage, it marks the first time police in Australia have used a live version of the technology.

‘Terrifying overreach’

The rollout has also drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

Digital Rights Watch deputy chair Tom Sulston was highly critical of the technology use.

“WA Police’s expansion of facial surveillance is grossly disproportionate and a terrifying overreach of police infrastructure that will result in innocent Australians being surveilled and criminalised,” Sulston told Information Age.

“Everyone will have to submit to having their personal biometric information collected just to go out in public to see some sport or do some shopping.

“We deserve to be able to go out in public without being subjected to mass dragnet surveillance like this.”

Electronic Frontiers Australia chair John Pane labelled the initiative “an outrageous act of police overreach and a fundamental breach of our individual and collective human and digital rights”.

“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,” Pane told Information Age.

WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch defended the trial, saying signage would be placed around the vehicle to inform the public when the technology was in use.

“This is not about mass surveillance – this is about specifying those in our community who are wanted by police,” Blanch said.

Sulston argued facial recognition technology is “infamously unreliable”, particularly for women and non-white people.

“This means that already over-policed minority groups, like First Nations people, will face the injustice of being more likely to be incorrectly matched against a suspect, more likely to have unwanted interactions with police and more likely to be picked up for trivial infringements as part of the dragnet,” he said.

“Once a person matches a suspect, it is very hard to retrain the system to exclude them, meaning that the same person will be repeatedly harassed by police while just going about their life.”

CCTV vs facial recognition

Blanch positioned the technology as more privacy-protecting than CCTV cameras.

“CCTV cameras are everywhere,” he said.

“They are owned by private businesses, local councils, they are around the world…and who are they owned by? No-one would know.

“They capture information of everyone, they store pictures of everyone – for how long, I don’t know.

“This technology here pixelates those who are not on the list, does not store information, deletes it immediately.

“This is actually a way that we can increase the freedoms and privacy of our community.

“This is less of an intrusive capability than a standard CCTV camera.”

Pane rejected that characterisation.

“If this is the way the WA Police Commissioner helps improve the privacy and freedoms of Western Australians, we would hate to see what he would do to damage those two critical human rights,” he said.

“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.”

Blanch said public debate around facial recognition technology was important and welcomed scrutiny of the trial.

“We already use facial recognition in a capacity that is not overt,” he said.

“We already do that. We want the conversation and that debate to continue.

“This is how we intend to keep our community safe. Let’s have that conversation first before we decide to go any further.”

Fears over use at protests

While Blanch said there was no intent to use live facial recognition at protests, police would do so if there was “intelligence that there is a significant risk of someone seeking to do harm”.

Sulston warned against scope creep with the technology and called for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology, especially in high-risk scenarios like policing.

“It feels inevitable that this technology will be used to surveil, profile and target Australians exercising their democratic rights to association and free speech,” he said.

“It’s baffling that the WA government would permit such an authoritarian use of surveillance technology.”

Many large Australian retailers have also embraced the use of facial recognition technologies, despite a series of rulings by the privacy watchdog that this may be in breach of the law.

Earlier this year the Administrative Review Tribunal overruled a Privacy Commissioner decision that Bunnings use of biometric matching was unlawful.

Bunnings deployed the technology across more than 60 stores in New South Wales and Victoria from early 2019 to late 2021.

The Privacy Commissioner also ruled that Kmart’s use of facial recognition breached Australian law because it was used “indiscriminately” across nearly 30 stores without telling shoppers or seeking their consent.