Garda Commissioner Drew Harris is expected to tell an Oireachtas committee that 'manual processing by Garda personnel sitting at screens is becoming unfeasible and ineffective'. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Timeshas come to the attention of the Garda, an Oireachtas committee will hear on Tuesday, as it considers evidence on the merits of introducing facial recognition technology for policing.
Individual murder investigations can have “upwards of 50,000 hours of footage” and “seized devices can have over a million images of child sexual abuse”, the Oireachtas Committee on Justice will be told. say the use of FRT by police “engages many fundamental human rights”, including rights to human dignity, privacy, protection of personal data and protest.
It continues: “Facial recognition technology does not provide definitive results” and there are factors that can “significantly impact the reliability and accuracy of the technology”. He says that in dismissing the respective appeal cases of convicted murderers Freddie Thompson and Philip Dunbar, “the court’s rulings were instructive in terms of the balance between a suspect’s right to privacy and the human rights of the victim”.