23 June 2026 – Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has strongly condemned the Western Australia Police Force’s deployment of live facial recognition technology in public spaces. In this Australian first, a marked police van will be used outside major events and in crowded areas to scan the faces of people walking past in real time.
“This is an outrageous act of police overreach and a fundamental breach of our individual and collective human and digital rights.”
— Electronic Frontiers Australia
Biometric information in Western Australia is protected via a dual framework split between the private and public sectors. The private sector is bound by the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). For the state public sector, protections are governed by the Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing Act 2024 (WA) (PRIS Act), with its primary Information Privacy Principles (IPPs) commencing on 1 July 2026. Under both regimes, biometric data and templates are legally categorised as “sensitive information,” requiring strict consent for collection, mandatory Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for high-impact uses, and restricted application in automated decision-making.
EFA is calling on WA Police to answer the following questions:
- Did WA Police consult with the WA Information Commissioner, and what was their advice?
- How is express consent being collected from members of the public?
- Has a mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment been undertaken and published for public scrutiny?
- Have WA Police demonstrated that scanning the public’s faces is both necessary and proportionate?
- Has a human rights impact assessment been conducted?
Or…are they relying on the fact that the WA Information Privacy Principles do not take effect until 01 July 2026, thereby avoiding their privacy law obligations?
International Comparison
In the European Union, the EU AI Act prohibits “one-to-many” biometric and “real-time” remote biometric identification (RBI) in public spaces for law enforcement except under narrow statutory carve-outs and subject to judicial approval. Human rights considerations are factored into the deployment assessment of this technology— an approach apparently absent in Western Australia.
The deployment of facial recognition tools faces severe technical criticism regarding data integrity and automation bias. The operational error rates of proprietary police deployments remain uncertain due to a lack of publicly available, audited field data from live trials, largely because police keep the results secret, despite those results being likely to reveal harm to human rights.
Decades of independent testing by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) confirm that facial recognition algorithms regularly produce biased results:
- False-match rates are consistently higher for women, younger demographics, and individuals with darker skin tones. In a law enforcement context, this technical limitation directly translates into a higher probability of wrongful stops, detentions, and interrogation for minority groups.
- There are strong human and digital rights risks when an algorithm with a supposed accuracy rate of 99.9% is deployed against a massive population baseline (e.g., scanning 100,000 commuters in a transit hub or at a major sporting event or concert), as the system’s marginal error rate creates a huge volume of false alerts. For example, if 100,000 innocent people are scanned, a 0.1% false-positive rate will still result in 100 false alarms. If there is only one actual suspect in that crowd, a police intervention triggered by a system alert has a 99% probability of targeting an innocent individual. This dynamic overloads police resources and creates frequent, groundless civil liberty and human rights violations.
WA Police Commissioner Blanch has claimed: “This is actually a way that we can increase the freedoms and the privacy of our community.”
EFA Chair John Pane responded: “If this is the way WA Police Commissioner helps improve the privacy and freedoms of Western Australians, we would hate to see what he would do to damage those two critical human rights”.
“What we are talking about is a massive breach of human rights and privacy and one which could increase in scope and scale in the absence of strong laws to limit the use of biometric technologies in public and private spaces. The use of real time biometric image matching in public spaces by WA police really is the cherry sitting on top of the surveillance state cake”.
Established in 1994, Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. (EFA) is a not-for-profit national organisation dedicated to protecting the civil liberties and human rights of Australians in the digital environment. Donate to EFA’s mission here.
Image credit: Scott Rodgerson.