Dr. Daragh Murray:

I will make just two points very quickly. On the black box, in the UK there is a public sector equality duty, and I am not sure if there is an equivalent piece of legislation in Ireland. Essentially, in the only case that went to court about the police use of facial recognition, they said that the black box was not sufficient to discharge the police's duty, so even though there might have been a proprietary interest in the algorithm, the police still had an obligation under the equality Act to ensure that there was no discrimination. The fact of a black box was not sufficient of itself. That raises a whole other scope of issues, but in terms of the police's obligations to prevent discrimination, it may be a relevant point.

The second one is about the chilling effect. I think the chilling effects are a significant concern because of their potential to undermine democratic processes and have a significant impact on human rights. The difficulty with the chilling effect is that we do not know what the precise impact of facial recognition is going to be, and that should be a cause for concern. The issue is that we might have very negligible effects in the short term but that the impact may be profound in the long term. That is why we do not want to sleepwalk into a very dystopian future. The risk of chilling effects are compounded by the broadness of this proposed legislation. As it stands, it is an enabling mechanism that allows for facial recognition to be used in a wide variety of contexts. As a simple example, the range of activities that can be considered important or relevant to the investigation of a crime is huge. Reasonable people can have a very different interpretation of it so what it comes down to is that facial recognition as it stands could nearly be used for any activity and related to one of the offences, which in themselves are very broad. As it stands, the open-ended nature of the authority that is given to the Garda is a problem.