NSW introduces facial recognition at gambling venues for statewide exclusion register
New South Wales is deploying facial recognition technology at gambling venues to enforce a statewide self-exclusion register, automatically identifying people who have asked to be banned from gambling premises.
Why this matters: The stated goal is harm reduction, and that is real. People struggling with gambling addiction can ask to be kept out, and a system that actually enforces that has obvious value. But the tradeoff is that every person who walks into a casino or pub with poker machines now gets their face scanned and checked against a government database. That is a lot of biometric data collected on a lot of ordinary people to catch a smaller group who want help. The accountability question is who holds that data, how long it stays, and what else it can be used for once the infrastructure exists.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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