Kore i9

Like the unchecked rollout of artificial intelligence and automation taking over our lives, facial recognition is coming to Australia, whether you want it to or not.

In the same week a parliamentary enquiry is examining the merits of Australia’s proposed facial recognition regime, Sydney Airport is “in the throes” of a project to use the technology to handle passenger pre-boarding and arrivals.

According to ITNews, airport planning project manager Lisa Airth calls it the “fast passenger processing project”.

Airth revealed the plan at the Biometric Institute conference in Sydney on Thursday and said an initial pilot of the end-to-end system will be conducted in the second half of this year.

While that sounds like a neat way to speed up queues, Airth went on to tell conference goers that the project was being built on the automation of the border clearance process by the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

“After all this was implemented we started to look at and understand how we start sharing the common information to all the other companies you come across as you actually move through the terminal,” Airth said.

Whoa, there. Just two days ago, the Human Rights Law Centre made a submission to the parliamentary enquiry into Australia’s proposed national facial recognition regime, specifically saying the country’s law system is nowhere near prepared to handle it responsibly.

For starters, the technology isn’t even reliable.

Just last month, British police were under pressure to explain how its new facial recognition technology falsely identified 2297 out of 2470 football fans as “persons of interest”.

Not reliable, and well open for what most people would consider abuse.