Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Legislation like this makes me quite nervous. I always struggle not to see something like this through the lens of social class. Senator Ward asked about the intentions of technological profiling. With all the best intentions, we can say that that is not the purpose of this legislation. However, class bias is already built into technologies and into algorithms before we even put the CCTV cameras up for their intended use. How do we safeguard people from working class communities who will probably be disproportionately affected by the use of cameras in their community?

This legislation talks about prevention of crime. I do not think that anyone should be under the illusion that this would prevent crime. In particular in the places where there will be calls to put CCTV, the crime will just move to another location. This is about the detection of crime. My concern is that if we look for crime in particular places, we are going to find it. The most important thing for me will be how the decisions will made about where we look. Whatever about the technology not being set out to profile people, the decisions are already set to profile people. This is because decisions will be made geographically, by socioeconomic class, and about particular communities where there is a high amount of deprivation that results in a particular amount of criminality at whatever level. The profiling will have, therefore, already happened before the CCTV camera even goes in. This is what makes me nervous.

From the point of view of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, how do we ensure that we can protect people from being disproportionately impacted by the use of technology in terms of their civil liberties, their race, their class and everything else that is already built into technology that we have not even procured but for which will have legislation? We do not really have an understanding of what has been built into the technology that we will procure.