{"id":"camfeed-132","numeric_id":132,"short_title":"","seo_title":"","social_title":"","headline":"","teaser_title":"","titles_source_url":"","titles_fetched_at":"","title":"WA Police Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias Issues","canonical_url":"https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/k6AY95t2V6fOBjAkJFHUEA","published_at":"2026-08-11T02:22:17+00:00","source":"CamClip","source_type":"camclip","type":"video clip","content_role":"appearance","author":"Cam Wilson","summary":"","text":"","has_full_text":false,"mcp_visible":true,"mcp_full_text_allowed":true,"full_text_word_count":0,"full_text_status":"","full_text_source_url":"","full_text_fetched_at":"","has_transcript":true,"transcript_status":"done","transcript_kind":"raw","transcript_char_count":5405,"topics":["AI"],"quoted_author":"","quoted_url":"","quoted_text":"","citation":"Cameron Wilson, \"WA Police Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias Issues\", CamClip, 2026-08-11, https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/k6AY95t2V6fOBjAkJFHUEA","citation_markdown":"Cameron Wilson, [WA Police Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias Issues](https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/k6AY95t2V6fOBjAkJFHUEA) — CamClip — 2026-08-11","attribution":"Source: CamClip. Link to canonical URL: https://clip.cameronwilson.com.au/s/k6AY95t2V6fOBjAkJFHUEA","transcript":"Thanks, Barbara. Privacy experts and legal advocates have criticized an AI mass surveillance pilot program being rolled out in Western Australia. Since the trial began in June, cameras linked to facial recognition software have scanned more than 130,000 people in Perth and Fremantle, comparing their faces against a police watch list in real time. National AI reporter Cam Wilson has the story and is with me in the studio to tell us all about it. Hi, Cam. Hi Ross. So what is this program? What's it about? So starting in June, WA Police did the first ever Australian trial by police of a live facial recognition scanning program. People might be familiar with facial recognition stuff we have in our phones. That's kind of a one-to-one scan. So it checks your face against the one that you know you're supposed to have to open it. This is a kind of more complex one, which is known as one-to-many. And so it scans, you know, you can look at a crowd, it can scan all the faces and compare it against a watch list to see if there are any matches. WA police says that they have a watch list of about 4,000 people. That includes people who've been accused of a serious crime, uh, people who are have an outstanding warrant, missing persons, and also people who are believed to be a risk to themselves or others. And they have been trialing using this technology to pick up people in the community. Um so they've kind of taken out a van, they go out, they scan the faces as very clear signage as part of this trial saying we're doing this now. And when their system pings, it thinks that it has found someone who matches the watch list. They have someone like a police officer or officers go out and meet the person, see who it is, and then potentially arrest them if that is what the appropriate thing is to do. In this trial, it's been going on for more than a month. They've only released the first week of data so far. They said that they had 33 flags that led to 18 arrests, but also one false alert that identified someone as someone who would who they were not in this early part of the trial. And this has obviously raised privacy concerns. Yeah, so I mean, facial recognition software is quite well known for having racial biases. That's not something that is, you know, kind of inherent to the technology, but is just based on the fact that most facial recognition software and technology has been trained on a corpus of data that is primarily white middle-aged faces. And so outside of that main demographic, they're known to have more accuracy issues because obviously, you know, you train how it works is that they create a neural network. All you gotta know is like kind of like anyone else learning something. You look at something, and as you get to know it more, you're better at kind of telling small differences apart. But if you don't have many examples of it, it's kind of hard to be able to do as good a job determining between them. We so when WA police launched this trial, they said there's a UK trial of a similar technology a few years ago, and they found there was no statistically significant difference between demographic or ethnicity groups for this exact same technology. So they said, hey, look at this, they've done this trial. We know that it actually can be done in a way that doesn't have these biases. However, experts that we spoke to said that that trial was in very different circumstances, both in kind of ideal conditions, so like straight on, good lighting in worse conditions. They they the trial actually showed that it had worse outcomes. And also just purely based on the fact that Australia's demographics are not the same. In particular, the thing that we've really looked at is First Nations people, because First Nations people are already subject to over policing in Australia. And so combining that with the fact that we have not received any confirmation from either police or the technology provider that they trained specifically on First Nation faces, leads experts to believe that there is a good chance that this technology, as it's being rolled out, would be less accurate on First Nations people and therefore more likely to, you know, potentially identify them as someone they're not and lead to that over policing. And how do police respond to that? So I mean, look, they said that this is just a trial at the moment, and this is kind of very early days. Andy Burns and I are have been looking into this, and we've put it repeatedly to police to say, you know, what have you done to mitigate this risk? And they say, you know, let's bear this trial out and see what happens. Um we we hope to hear some more information from police soon to find out how this has worked, to understand more, even about in terms of the people who've been identified and arrested, how many of them are First Nations people, what actual crimes they were for arrested for, what the warrants for. There's a lot that we don't know about this, and so you know, I don't think there's very few people who say this technology, if works well, if it's able to protect privacy, help policing in a safe way, that that's not something that people would like. It's just, of course, like how it's actually working in practice. Have these known risks been mitigated? Um, WA police have yet to kind of show that they've taken serious steps towards that. Thanks, Ross. Thanks, Cam.","transcript_note":"Raw or automatically generated transcript. Check the linked recording before using verbatim quotations."}