-2.png?w=1024)
Walking through a train station or shopping precinct in Western Australia now comes with a new possibility: an AI system may be checking your face against a police watchlist.
Western Australia Police is conducting a five-month trial of live facial recognition technology that can scan people in real time from cameras mounted on marked police vans. In the system’s first week, more than 130,000 faces were scanned, according to recent Australian reporting.
For Australians, the experiment raises a question that stretches beyond whether the technology can catch wanted people: How much AI-powered surveillance should residents encounter simply by moving through a public space?
How Australia’s live facial recognition trial works
WA Police launched the trial in June, describing live facial recognition as a tool for locating people including wanted offenders, missing persons, and others police are seeking.
According to WA Police’s explanation of the technology, cameras detect faces within a designated area and create temporary biometric templates. Those templates are compared against an alert list containing police-held images.
When the software identifies a potential match, an officer reviews the alert before deciding whether to approach the person. Police say biometric templates from people who do not trigger an alert are automatically deleted.
The distinction is important. Australian police have previously used facial recognition on recorded images, but the WA trial brings the technology into live public spaces.
Similar deployments have already sparked disputes elsewhere. In the United States, New Orleans police used real-time facial recognition to track people, showing how the technology can move from retrospective investigations toward real-time monitoring.
130,000 faces scanned in one week
The scale of the WA experiment became clearer after its first week.
A police van scanned more than 130,000 faces in busy public areas and generated 33 alerts, according to Australian reporting on the trial. The latest report says those alerts led to 18 arrests, along with two false alerts.
Earlier reporting put the arrest count at 19, creating a discrepancy in published figures. WA Police’s public-facing live facial recognition page does not currently provide those first-week totals. Either way, the numbers reveal a striking imbalance: more than 130,000 faces were analyzed to generate a few dozen alerts.
WA Police says its deployments are overt rather than secret. The agency uses marked vehicles, signage, and QR codes to notify the public that live facial recognition is operating. Deployments must also be authorized by an officer ranked superintendent or higher, with officials required to consider whether using the technology is necessary and proportionate.
But notification is different from participation. People passing through an area do not actively enroll in the facial recognition system before their biometric information is analyzed.
The technology sits inside a broader global argument about who should be allowed to scan a face and under what circumstances. China, for example, has restricted facial recognition by private organizations while treating public security authorities differently, as eWeek reported in 2025.
Privacy questions follow Australians into public spaces
Critics say deleting biometric templates does not eliminate the larger privacy question surrounding large-scale analysis of people moving through public areas.
Western Australia classifies biometric information as sensitive personal information. Under the state’s police privacy statement, WA Police is subject to the Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing Act 2024, although exceptions can apply when the agency carries out law-enforcement functions.
In comments to news.com.au, Greg Barns SC, a spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance, warned that police surveillance technologies can expand to monitoring people engaged in lawful activity. University of Western Australia legal academic Anna Zenz also told the outlet that she had concerns about oversight and the potential for “function creep,” in which technology introduced for one purpose gradually expands into others.
Experts quoted by news.com.au also raised concerns about whether facial recognition technology could perform differently across Australia’s diverse population, potentially increasing the risk of misidentification among minority groups. WA Police, however, says testing of its system found high accuracy and minimal demographic variation in controlled environments and that safeguards are in place to reduce bias and incorrect matches.
The WA trial itself has already produced two false alerts, according to the latest reporting. WA Police stresses that a facial recognition alert is not considered a positive identification and that officers must independently assess a match.
That human-review requirement matters because facial recognition has a history of false positives and disputed law-enforcement uses. eWeek has previously examined privacy concerns surrounding facial recognition technology, including the implications of identifying people who otherwise might remain anonymous in public.
What happens after the trial?
WA Police says every live facial recognition deployment is evaluated, and the five-month trial will help determine how the technology might be used in the future. That makes Western Australia something of a national test case.
If police conclude the trial has improved public safety, other Australian jurisdictions may look closely at the results. But the trial also gives privacy advocates, lawmakers, and residents something more concrete to evaluate: not what live AI surveillance could look like someday, but how it operates when more than 100,000 ordinary people pass in front of its cameras.
The debate over facial recognition is no longer confined to smartphones, airports, or hypothetical AI policy. For Australians walking through public spaces in Western Australia, it is already happening.
Want more APAC news? For more on AI’s impact in the region, see how AI is reshaping cybersecurity across Australia and Asia-Pacific