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 nation where your 'faceprint' is already being tracked - BBC Future

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2022-06-24 09:00:08

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 Western 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.