Australia Is The Only Democratic Nation That Tracks Its Citizens By Their ‘Faceprint’ For COVID Containment Procedures, But That’s About To Change

June 25, 2022 admin News 0

Australia’s unique use of facial recognition technology from tech startup Genvis, called a faceprint, has caused controversy, stoking privacy fears that it could become a world leader in regulating its use.

Let me introduce you to a term that is about to become ‘all the rage’, your faceprint, and it soon will replace your fingerprint as the primary means of identification. In Australia, a tech company called Genvis has struck it rich by supplying the government there with faceprint tools to track their citizens who have COVID. This has worked so wonderfully well during the pandemic that now this draconian technology is being rolled out to all citizens who want access to any government services.

“Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy forehead strong against their foreheads.” Ezekiel 3:8 (KJB)

The Genvis site says “What started with the introduction of a simple Q.R. code based travel permit system to manage the travel restrictions that came into effect in March 2020 has evolved into a comprehensive platform that powers much of Western Australia’s COVID response in support of the state’s elimination strategy. The G2G app uses facial recognition to confirm the identity of people in quarantine and location services to verify their location. A full-scale quarantine management solution, G2G Now saves significant police resources and is an Australian first.” If you need that translated, it reads like this. “We used the pandemic to rollout hyper-invasive faceprint tracking technology, and that worked so well we will now be using it on all citizens for their every interaction for any government service”.

One of the oh-so-catchy slogans created by the Genvis marketing team is “we’ll contact you when it’s time to check-in”. Oh yeah, man, I bet you will. I believe the Eagles said it best when they sang “You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Thank you very much, but I will not be checking-in.

Australia is now tracking their citizens via their faceprint from Genvis

FROM THE BBC: If a person in Western Australia contracts Covid-19, they must remain in home quarantine for the following seven days – as do their close contacts. The police check up on their whereabouts by sending periodic text messages and require a selfie to be sent back to them within 15 minutes. The police use facial recognition technology and GPS tracking to determine if the person who took the selfie is at home. If they are not, they quickly follow up with a knock on the door and a potentially hefty fine.

The G2G app by local tech start-up Genvis has been used by more than 150,000 people in the state since it was rolled out in September 2020. The same technology, albeit provided by different companies, has been piloted in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Australia stands out as the only democracy to use facial recognition technology to aid Covid-19 containment procedures while other countries were pushing back against the idea of such surveillance.

San Francisco was the first city in the US to introduce a moratorium against police using facial recognition in May 2019. It was quickly followed by Oakland, also in California, and Somerville in Massachusetts. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google have declared they will not sell their facial recognition algorithms to law enforcements agencies until there is a federal law in place. In November 2021, Meta said that Facebook would delete one billion “faceprints” and cease using the technology for the purposes of tagging people in photos.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has called for a moratorium on the technology until Australia has a specific law to regulate its use. Human rights campaigners say there is potential for the personal data obtained to be used for secondary purposes, and that it is a slippery slope towards becoming a surveillance state. Groups such as Amnesty warn that the use of facial recognition leads to racial discrimination.

“The pandemic created all these new justifications for using facial recognition technology,” says Mark Andrejevic, a professor of media studies at Monash University in Melbourne and the author of a forthcoming book titled Facial Recognition.

“Everything went online and organisations were trying to make things work very quickly. But the implications haven’t been thought through. Do we want to live in a world where everything is rendered and there are no private spaces? It creates a whole new level of stress that does not lead to a healthy society.”

Consent is needed for the G2G app to be used, and it was also needed in the aftermath of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires of 2020, when those who had lost their identification papers used facial recognition to qualify for disaster relief payments. But there have been cases of facial recognition technology being used covertly.

In October, convenience store group 7-Eleven was found to have breached their customers’ privacy by collecting faceprints from 1.6 million Australian customers when they completed satisfaction surveys. The faceprints were purportedly obtained in order to obtain demographic profiles and prevent staff from gaming the surveys by boosting their ratings. It did not receive a fine. Australia’s Department of Home Affairs began building a national facial recognition database in 2016, and it appears poised to roll it out. In January, it put out a tender for a company to “build and deploy” the data.

“Facial recognition is on the cusp of relatively widespread deployment,” says Andrejevic. “Australia is gearing up to use facial recognition to allow access to government services. And among law enforcement agencies, there’s definitely a desire to have access to these tools.” READ MORE

This is the G2G Pass from Genvis

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