Civil liberty groups say an app being trialled in South Australia that uses facial recognition and geolocation to enforce home quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic should not be used until the proper safeguards are in place.
South Australia is currently using a government-developed app to enforce home quarantine compliance for a small cohort of returning interstate travellers who opt-in to the trial.
Users are sent a message at random times and must respond within 15 minutes, verifying their location and identity using facial recognition and geolocation.
If they fail to do so, SA Health notifies police, who then attend the person’s home for a physical check. The state government has justified the app by citing its potential to reduce the costs associated with hotel quarantine, and say it may be used for international travellers in the future.
The use of the app has not been widely reported in the Australian media.
But a piece in US outlet the Atlantic this week described it as “an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules”. The piece triggered a wave of coverage, including by rightwing outlets Breitbart and Fox News, which condemned Australia for its erosion of civil liberties.
Police have since defended the app, saying the claims were “absurd”. The state government said it was trialling the app with “a selected cohort of returning South Australians who have applied to be part of the trial”.
The cohort is about 50 people and the state will report back to national cabinet on its success or failure.
But the use of such technology without proper safeguards and scrutiny has concerned Australian civil liberty groups too.
NSW Council for Civil Liberties secretary Michelle Falstein told the Guardian that the lack of primary legislation underpinning apps of this kind has made it difficult to assess how privacy concerns are managed, how long data is being kept, who it’s shared with, and how it is stored.
“It’s the usual thing, it’s done in a very half-baked way, and without all the necessary provisions about what you actually do with the information you’re collecting,” she said.
The NSWCCL wants a moratorium on the use of biometrics and facial recognition in apps like South Australia’s.
Falstein said it was possible for facial verification to be conducted safely and appropriately, with the right safeguards. But she said there were no examples in Australia where such technology had been used in such a way.
“In principle, if it’s one-for-one facial verification and that information is destroyed as soon as that person is finished in quarantine, and there are a whole lot of other safeguards around it, you’d think ‘that’s fine’,” she said.
“But that’s not the case in most circumstances. I certainly can’t see anything around about what the South Australian government is doing with its program.”
The state’s premier, Steven Marshall, has previously said that the information gathered by the app would be kept confidential and be subject to stringent security.
He also said the government would not be storing information from the app.
“We just use it to verify that people are where they said they were going to be during the home-based quarantine,” he said.