At Parliament House today, the UTS Human Technology Institute was awarded one of six grants from the James Martin Institute’s inaugural Policy Challenge Round for its Facial Recognition Technology Research Project: Governing facial recognition technology for digital identity.

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Descriptive transcript

Nella Soeterboek: The University of Technology Sydney is a technological university. We're world-renowned in terms of our teaching and research around technological developments.

[On screen: UTS campus and students. Cut to Ed Santow speaking.]

Ed Santow: The Human Technology Institute is building a future that applies human values to new technologies. Service NSW has an impressive new initiative on digital identity. We know that this could be incredibly useful for people in New South Wales, but there are risks and threats.

Lauren Perry: And so we at the HTI are really looking forward to partnering and working with Service NSW, in order to make sure that their new offering for citizens is as effective, safe and efficient as can be. We're very excited to be working with the James Martin Institute. What it is allowing us to do is to create a deep partnership with Service NSW as part of the NSW Government.

We're really excited to work with the JMI in partnership, through the generous funding as well as the additional services such as communications support, to really share the story and hopefully be able to share some best practice news that comes out of this.

We want New South Wales to be at the cutting edge, not just of the technology, but also of the protections that are really the things that will give a firm foundation for community trust.

The Human Technology Institute will work with Service NSW by doing two things. The first is we want to help them build a really strong governance framework. The HTI proposes working with Service NSW in order to upskill their workforce with the right skills and training that they need in order to understand the technology and deliver it safely.

And so what this project I think really embodies is that vision that technology must be designed, developed and overseen in ways that really put people at the centre.

The prestigious awards, worth $300,000, are the first of an annual program aiming to fund applied public policy research. 

According to HTI’s Professor Santow, who leads the project, our aim is to ‘work with Service NSW to help them create a really good governance framework to protect people against harm’.  

Governments are increasingly using facial recognition technology (FRT) for a range of purposes from service delivery to law enforcement. This raises some important legal, human rights and ethical issues, especially given FRT’s impact on the right to privacy. With strong legal guardrails, and clarity about the functions for which government should and should not use FRT, FRT can bring significant public benefit. However, the absence of effective protections puts individuals at severe risk of harm and can threaten community trust in government. As Service NSW develops a digital identity verification system using FRT, there is a need to ensure that the law and broader governance system protect NSW citizens and build a firm foundation of trust. 

Byline: Human Technology Institute

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