Western Australia privacy commissioner not consulted on police facial recognition trial
Western Australia police conducted a facial recognition trial without consulting the state's privacy commissioner, according to reports from Biometric Update. The oversight body was left out of the process despite its mandate to protect residents' privacy rights.
Why this matters: A police agency ran a facial recognition trial and did not bother to call the person whose job is to protect the public from exactly this kind of thing. That is not a procedural slip. It is a choice. Facial recognition makes mistakes, and those mistakes tend to land on specific groups of people. When the privacy watchdog is cut out before the technology goes live, there is no independent check on how it works, what data it keeps, or who gets flagged. The consultation step exists for a reason. Skipping it tells you something about how seriously the department takes the answer it might have gotten.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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