WA Police AI Facial Recognition Pilot Raises Privacy Concerns Over Racial Bias

Thank you. 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. Tell us about this program. Yeah, so WA Police has been trialing this program since June, and as you mentioned, it is a uh AI facial recognition um uh software that is used to um compare faces that are scanned using normal CCTV cameras against a watch list of around 4,000 people. WA police say that the people on the watch lists include those accused of serious offenses, people with a warrant out against them, and people who are missing people, as well as people who've been identified as a risk to themselves or others. This has been now happening for a couple of weeks. It is a trial and is the first time an Australian police force has used this technology live. And WA police say that it is something that they believe that other state police forces are watching quite closely. Obviously, this has raised privacy concerns. Yes, so facial the facial recognition software and technology is well known for having potential racial biases, and that's because it's essentially this is uh AI technology that's trained on uh thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of faces, and by through that process, it learns how to recognize faces compared to other faces. Um typically this data uh is um uh has like overrepresented um white um demographic other faces, uh, and so it it sometimes faces issues of with accuracy when it comes to demographics that aren't um as necessarily well represented in that training data. Now, um a similar uh the same technology trialled in the UK underwent official testing, and um that testing showed that there was no statistical significant uh difference between demographics and gender in ideal conditions. Um, but the issue that is raised is whether this technology is being used in those exact conditions as it is being trialled. For example, the conditions that were tried are, you know, people going through a crowd straight on in perfect sunlight. Obviously, that's not exactly the way the world works, you know, different weather, different angles, and in particular, questions about how it might struggle with First Nations faces. That's because it seems very unlikely that this data has been, that this technology has been trained on a corpus of data that has First Nations faces in it. We asked WA police, we asked the provider, and neither said that they did. And so as a result, there's reason to suspect based on that that it is unlikely that it would do as good a job as recognising those faces. What's the ramification of that? Well, if you're not as good at recognising those faces, you might fail to make matches or you might make false matches. And so in this case, what might end up happening is people would get uh wrongly recognized and accused of being on that watch list. Um, obviously, as we uh well know that um Indigenous Australians face already over policing. So there are real questions about um what WA police has done to prepare for this very well known issue. We of course have put it to them and they have declined to say, but they've just said, you know, this is part of what the trial will be looking at. Okay, Wilson, thank you. Thank you.