Western Australia police will soon become the first law enforcement agency in Australia to deploy live facial recognition technology in what privacy advocates have labelled an “outrageous overreach”. The WA Police Force plans to trial a marked police van outside major events and in crowded public areas, scanning people as they walk past. The technology will compare live images with a database of individuals with outstanding arrest warrants, registered child sex offenders and missing persons. The live images will be matched with a database of 4,000 people. If a match is detected, the live image will be kept and an alert will be sent to nearby police officers who will confirm the individual’s identity. While a number of police forces around the country already use facial recognition technologies to analyse already obtained footage, it marks the first time police in Australia have used a live version of the technology. ‘Terrifying overreach’ The rollout has also drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates. Digital Rights Watch deputy chair Tom Sulston was highly critical of the technology use. “WA Police’s expansion of facial surveillance is grossly disproportionate and a terrifying overreach of police infrastructure that will result in innocent Australians being surveilled and criminalised,” Sulston told Information Age. “Everyone will have to submit to having their personal biometric information collected just to go out in public to see some sport or do some shopping. “We deserve to be able to go out in public without being subjected to mass dragnet surveillance like this.” Electronic Frontiers Australia chair John Pane labelled the initiative “an outrageous act of police overreach and a fundamental breach of our individual and collective human and digital rights”. “The use of real-time biometric image matching in public spaces by WA Police really is the cherry sitting on top of the