Government is split over the introduction of facial recognition technology because it has an error rate of up to 80%, a Fianna Fail TD has claimed.
James Lawless, chair of the Dail justice committee, has concerns about the new technology.
He is worried about reported failure rates showing it misidentified up to four in five people in some other jurisdictions.
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And he has fears that it could be abused as there has been claims it has been used for “racial profiling” in the UK.
However, Fine Gael Justice Minister Helen McEntee is keen on the technology.
Mr Lawless said: “I would have a concern about the use of artificial intelligence.
“There’s a report from the Met Police who have been using this for a couple of years in London and there was a report which showed that 80% of cases they actually identified the wrong person.
“So trying to identify a person on the street or somebody in a crowd, they actually four out of five times got the wrong person, that was from a report in 2019… certainly in well over half of cases it was wrong.”
He was speaking on RTE’s Today with Claire Byrne, where he said that he would prefer a pilot exercise before facial recognition is used widely. Mr Lawless added: “There needs to be a human being, I think the minister is saying that and I would strongly support that.
“That’s really key.
“We can’t get into this as a society where the computer says no, but the computer says arrest them, go get them, but actually it’s the wrong person. That would be a dystopian nightmare, so we really have to be careful.”
But Minister McEntee said it would help ensure gardai have the ability to do their job as efficiently as possible.
She said: “Technology is now involved in a huge amount of criminal activity and the gardai needs to have the resources to be able to deal with that effectively.
“I have a Bill that I hope to publish before the summer months and hopefully have implemented later on this year.”
And Garda Commissioner Drew Harris insists the measure would help gardai tackle serious crimes such as missing children and threats to national security.
He said: “The overall Bill is absolutely essential in terms of how we receive information digitally and how we store it and how we prepare it for court purposes.”
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