2018-07-03
Plans to face scan people who are accessing the social safety net shows yet another punitive barrier for people needing support.
“This is the Government once again making life harder for people accessing the social safety net”, Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said today.
“This adds another layer to accessing the social safety net and is unnecessary. It will be seen by many accessing support as punitive and adding to the regulatory burden.
“I will be asking when Parliament returns if false identifications will result in people not receiving payments, which could be detrimental to those that need our help”.
AG Digital Rights spokesperson Senator Jordon Steele-John said similar facial recognition software used in other jurisdictions had been shown to have a false-positive identification rate as high as 90 per cent, and significant racial biases.
“Why should we trust Centrelink, and private contractor Serco, with creepy face-scanning technology when they’ve proven time and again that they can’t be trusted to keep people’s data safe?
“I want to know why the government needs to impose such big brother-esque surveillance on those who need assistance, who it plans to share this data with, especially a multinational private company like Serco, and how it plans to keep it safe.”