Australia: National Driver Licence Facial Recognition to go live later this year
Despite Parliament still reviewing privacy legislation, the Face Verification Service. which has been on hold for 8 years, is about to start.
Facial recognition technology is operated in Sydney, Australia in this file photo. Ian Waldie/Getty Images
Facial recognition of driver’s licences is to be introduced across Australia later this year amid a government review of privacy laws.
The National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution (NDLFRS) was first proposed 8 years ago.
According to the federal government’s Digital Transformation Agency, the system will be hosted by the Department of Home Affairs, while each state and territory retains control over their data within the system.
“The purpose of this system is to protect Australian people from identity theft, to manage and prevent crime, to increase road safety and to improve identity verification,” the agency says.
“Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia have provided data to the NDLFRS, with other states and territories to follow.”
The policy is listed on the agency’s website as “unendorsed” and say it is still consulting on the issue, but the Attorney-General’s Department has updated its website to say that the Face Verification Service (FVS)—which checks whether a facial image and the biographic information on a person’s identity document matches their original government record—“is expected to be operational in 2025.”
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Western Australia will be the first state to make its licence data available for FVS use before the end of this year, with others set to follow.
It will mean that facial images from passports and driver’s licences will be able to be used for biometric verification of a person’s identity.
According to the Digital Transformation Agency, significant aspects of the policy are still to be finalised like appropriate governance and risk management frameworks during the deployment and monitoring phases.
Other areas include maintaining manual control over biometric decision making, and separate identify verification options.
The announcement from the Attorney-General’s Department does not explain how—or even whether—those concerns have been addressed before the roll-out.
The Epoch Times has approached the Department for comment.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge was critical of the government’s sudden haste, saying it had “failed to live up to its commitment to have stronger privacy laws in place to protect our online data.”
“This should not be rolled out until we have privacy laws fit for purpose that put far stronger barriers to this data being lost, misused or hacked,” he said.
“Facial recognition data is some of the most personal information that can be shared online, and right now, there is no confidence that the Albanese government has protections in place to keep this data safe.”
Creation of the NDLFRS began in 2017 when federal, state and territory leaders agreed to create a centralised database of biometric facial images provided by their respective agencies, which those agencies, including law enforcement, would then access.
The prime minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, denied that the system amounted to “mass surveillance,” saying the photos had been “available to law enforcement agencies now and have been for many years, if not for generations. What we’ve not been doing is accessing them in a modern, 21st-century way.”
However, the rollout was stalled when the Coalition government was unable to pass the Identity-Matching Services Bill 2019.
The Albanese government subsequently introduced the Identity Verification Services Act and the Identity Verification Services (Consequential Amendments) Act, which amounted to a reduced version of the earlier legislation.
The Australian Information Commissioner supported the new laws, though warning that stronger enforcement and oversight were needed, including bringing privacy breaches by government agencies under the Privacy Act.
Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind is on record as saying, “The human rights to safety and privacy are not mutually exclusive; rather, both must be preserved, upheld and promoted.”
The data provided earlier by Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia cannot be used in the system until “participation agreements” are signed under the new legislation, which was passed in 2004.
IDmatch, a joint state, territory and federal initiative set up to manage whole-of-government document and identity verification, says those agreements will “outline strong privacy, security and oversight requirements ... including provision of the expressed consent from individuals.”
Operation of the system will be handled by Fujitsu until June of next year, under a contract worth over $50 million.
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