Ireland wants facial recognition technology to be used by their police force. Euronews Next takes a look at what they’re considering.
ADVERTISEMENTNew proposed legislation in Ireland that would give national police the power to use facial recognition technology in some investigations could have a severe impact on human rights.
That was the overall message from a panel of experts who studied the issue for the Irish justice committee this month.
Facial identification is a process used by police where the template of an individual’s face is used to identify them in different videos.
The Irish Parliament passed the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Act in December which allows police to wear body cameras and have better access to CCTV footage during investigations.
The facial recognition legislation was added on as a draft amendment to this law in December.
It included a list of situations where police could use this process, including for offences such as rioting and violent disorder in light of the November 2023 Dublin riots.
The chilling effect
David Kaye, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Opinion and Expression, wrote in a submission to the justice committee that he believes the draft law “faces fundamental defects” when it comes to protecting human rights.
Using facial recognition technology in public places like streets, parks and train stations, Kaye continued, can create a chilling effect "about the loss of anonymity or being wrongly flagged".
Some facial recognition technologies show several matches ranked by probability score, according to Maynooth University criminology professor Ciara Bracken-Roche’s committee submission.
What that means, she continues, is that FRT "puts privacy at risk as individuals who have nothing to do with an event might still be brought into investigation if their probability score is high enough".
This chilling effect is more likely when police have "broad powers," like in Ireland’s proposed law, added Daragh Murray, a senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, in his submission.
According to Murray, that means that police are able to use facial recognition for “a wide variety of offences and a wide variety of purposes,” that are largely subjective and not defined.
“[Chilling effects] can undermine the right to protest, and the ability to mobilise or organise for political change,” Murray continued.
Biased and unreliable
Not only that, but others like Abeba Birhane, from the Mozilla Foundation and Trinity College Dublin, noted that the software used for facial recognition technology is often biased and unreliable, demonstrating "deeply inherent racial and gender biases".
For example, Birhane quoted a 2018 study that showed a 34.7 per cent error rate by facial recognition technologies when identifying Black women, compared to a 0.8 per cent error rate with White men.
Black men, too, are more likely with this technology to be misclassified as a “criminal” or suspicious person, Birhane continued.
"Computer vision, the basis for FRT, has come a long way… but the technology remains deeply flawed," she said in her submission.
There were also many calls among the submissions for an independent, impartial oversight measure to make sure police are cooperating with the new standards.
ADVERTISEMENTFRT ‘in the best interest of all parties’
Helen McEntree, Ireland’s minister of Justice, released a draft of this new regulation in December. At the time, she suggested that police would only use FRT technologies in review, and never in real-time.
She told the press at the time that the benefits outweigh the potential risks of the technology.
"Facial Recognition Technology will dramatically save time, speed up investigations and free up Garda resources for the high visibility policing we all want to see," McEntree said in a December statement.
"It is in the interests of all parties, not least victims of crime, to have criminal investigations pursued as effectively and rapidly as possible," she added.
If approved, Ireland would join at least 11 other European countries, according to a Euractiv report, who have allowed their police forces to use this technology.
ADVERTISEMENTThe European Union’s recent AI Act did include a provision for law enforcement to use facial recognition technology on recorded video footage without a judge’s approval.
The Gardai told Euronews Next that they would not comment on the report.
