Minister for Justice Helen McEntee recently announced her department was drawing up legislation to allow An Garda Síochána to use Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) to identify and track people in real time using CCTV.
The minister said the technology would help gardaí analyse CCTV footage for suspects in serious crimes or missing people and save thousands of man hours as gardaí would no longer have to manually trawl through footage.
However, the use of live facial recognition technology by police forces has already caused significant controversy in other countries and is its use by police is banned in major US cities like Boston and San Francisco.
More generally, facial recognition has attracted criticism due to its low success rate in identifying specific people, particularly people of colour and women. In the US, the system has been criticised as fuelling racist systems of policing and immigration.
So why is it being introduced in Ireland?
And while facial recognition may sound futuristic to some people, FRT and other forms of biometric surveillance already infiltrate our daily lives in supermarkets, airports and even hospitals.
Irish Times Crime Correspondent joins the podcast to discuss the Government’s plans for introducing FRT to Irish policing and explores some of the facial recognition tools which already freely exist online for anyone to use.
Today, on In the News, how will gardaí use Facial Recognition Technology, and is it really that easy to track someone down, just using their face?
