Australia is contending with a slew of new facial recognition technologies and their uses, in the context of regulatory gaps and insufficient understanding of the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which they are used.

Conversations about best practices for governing facial recognition systems at both the design and application levels are largely motivated by research ethics, competitive industry advantage, and public accountability to citizens, not the advantage of the people whose facial data will be fuelling facial recognition.

Considering the expanding scope of facial recognition uses, these discussions put into question the meaning of best practices and how to implement them. For example, regulatory gaps allow facial recognition technologies to be used intrusively and covertly.

The project is built on 30 qualitative multi-stakeholder interviews with government, corporate, and academic respondents, the data thematically analysed. The findings suggest that the governance of facial recognition technologies requires a comprehensive framework of laws, including a reform of the ongoing Privacy Act and a national law or charter of human rights at the first instance.

Furthermore, the study calls into question what “best practices” constitute in the national context of Australia, in particular considering the impacts on Indigenous Australians.

About the speaker

Dr Ausma Bernot is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Graduate School of Policing & Security, Charles Sturt University.

Ausma’s doctoral research explored the dynamic interaction between surveillance technologies and social context and questions totalisation of surveillance in China. Her current research focuses on the effects that the merging of infotech and biotech triggers in the fields of governance, surveillance, policing, and public safety.

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Image credit: Illustration of a mobile phone scanning a geometrically stylized face by Mike MacKenzie on flickr (CC by 2.0 licence)