(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Australia’s outgoing human rights commissioner has sounded the alarm about Australia “sliding into mass surveillance” if it continues to embrace the use of facial recognition technology. Edward Santow also criticised governments using the spectre of terrorism to pass broad laws that infringe on Australians’ privacy and end up being used for other purposes. 

These remarks come after the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) published a long-awaited report on human rights and technology in Australia. It took the significant step of recommending a temporary ban on the use of biometric technologies like facial recognition in areas of decision-making that are considered high-risk, such as by law enforcement or for government services. 

Santow, speaking at a webinar hosted by Monash University earlier this week, reiterated his concern about how facial recognition technology in particular presents a real threat to Australians, both due to the limited accuracy of technology and the risk of mass surveillance. 

These concerns primarily focus on one subsection of facial recognition technology. “One-to-one” facial recognition, like the face-scanning used to unlock an iPhone, tends to be accurate and less controversial.  

What’s more troubling to Santow is the use of “one-to-many” facial recognition, which is when multiple people are scanned by the technology looking for matches — such as when scanning a crowd for matches to a list of faces. He said this use of the technology tends to be inaccurate, particularly when it comes to women, people of colour and people with disabilities.

This can lead to cases where wrongly identified people are negatively affected, such as in the case of an African-American man in Michigan who was wrongly arrested because facial recognition thought he was someone else.

Santow also said some researchers and companies are proposing to use the technology in ways that aren’t supported by a wealth of evidence: “We can slide into phrenology really quickly when we use facial recognition to purportedly record someone’s emotional status.” 

But even if the technology was 100% accurate, Santow fears that use of facial recognition — by governments, police or businesses — risks removing Australians’ right to privacy. He said widespread adoption could curtail people’s ability to move in public without being watched. 

“It’s a bigger philosophical question whether we want to be a country that leans into facial recognition at a public scale. There’s a bigger issue at stake: we’ll become a country that accepts a much higher level of surveillance than we ever have to date,” he said.

Santow also condemned governments introducing broad surveillance measures and laws under the guise of national security matters, despite having much broader proposed uses. 

Using the example of the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019, which proposed to use state driver’s licence photographs to create a national database for facial recognition technology, Santow said the federal government’s arguments for the bill reductively focused on combating the threat of terrorism, despite paving the way for the data to be used for a much wider variety of purposes.

“The purpose was said to be able to catch the worst terrorists and criminals. It was presented like ‘if you don’t want this technology, you don’t want the terrorists to be caught’,” he said. 

While acknowledging the example of how China is using facial recognition as part of its dystopian social credit system, Santow cautioned against believing these fears apply only to authoritarian regimes.

“I don’t want to become fixated on the example of China, because we know in many other liberal democracies we know the use of facial recognition technology is growing, and being used to carry out high-stakes decision-making,” he said. 

To protect Australians against harm from technology that’s already being used now, Santow says, there needs to be comprehensive reform to Australia’s privacy laws that haven’t happened for more than a decade. 

Santow, who is set to finish up as commissioner at the end of the month, noted the ongoing Privacy Act review but urged further action. 

“The problem is this: we have data protection laws but we don’t have proper laws for our personal privacy rights. We need to have stronger, broader protections in place,” he said.

What do you think? Are you concerned we could be heading into mass surveillance? Share your thoughts with us by writing to letters@crikey.com.au, and include your full name if you’d like to be considered for publication.