At Parliament House today, the UTS Human Technology Institute was awarded one of six grants from the James Martin Institute’s inaugural Policy Challenge Round for its Facial Recognition Technology Research Project: Governing facial recognition technology for digital identity.
The prestigious awards, worth $300,000, are the first of an annual program aiming to fund applied public policy research.
According to HTI’s Professor Santow, who leads the project, our aim is to ‘work with Service NSW to help them create a really good governance framework to protect people against harm’.
Governments are increasingly using facial recognition technology (FRT) for a range of purposes from service delivery to law enforcement. This raises some important legal, human rights and ethical issues, especially given FRT’s impact on the right to privacy. With strong legal guardrails, and clarity about the functions for which government should and should not use FRT, FRT can bring significant public benefit. However, the absence of effective protections puts individuals at severe risk of harm and can threaten community trust in government. As Service NSW develops a digital identity verification system using FRT, there is a need to ensure that the law and broader governance system protect NSW citizens and build a firm foundation of trust.