Facial recognition named an oversight priority by Australian Information Commissioner

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has unveiled its regulatory priorities for 2025–26 as it juggles its oversight of age assurance, digital ID and biometrics.

As it looks over this year, and into the next, the commissioner will be focusing on such areas as collection and retention of personal information, facial recognition technology and forms of biometric scanning.

Australian Information Commissioner Elizabeth Tydd explained that the announcement aims to alert the public to the most harmful practices and to signal to industry and government which obligations demand attention.

“The OAIC is focusing its resources on the things that matter most and on the regulatory problems that pose the most harm,” Tydd said, adding that the right approach would foster innovation and drive economic and productivity gains.

The commission is not short of work as it works to deliver an Online Children’s Code by the end of 2026, while managing Australia’s digital ID system and document verification scheme. The Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) is set to release the final report from the Age Assurance Technology Trial to Parliament, the preliminary results of which were released in June, and the OAIC is presiding over an ongoing debate about the use of facial recognition in retail stores. The regulator is expected to handle the workload with 30 percent fewer staff.

In outlining its new priorities, the OAIC emphasized the need to rebalance power and information asymmetries that arise when sectors or technologies erode individual rights. Regulators will examine how artificial intelligence applications may undermine information access and privacy, and will press agencies to remedy systemic failures that delay requests under freedom-of-information laws.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind underscored the importance of enforcing online privacy safeguards, warning that “opaque and unfair extraction and use of personal information undermines consumer trust and confidence, and may ultimately impede participation in the digital economy and the adoption of new technologies.”

Another pillar of the OAIC’s strategy is preserving rights amid emerging technologies. The office will protect and monitor privacy and information access rights in the deployment of facial recognition, biometric scanning and new surveillance tools, such as location-tracking features in apps and connected vehicles. This will extend to government use of AI and automated decision-making systems.

Strengthening information governance within the Australian Public Service forms the third component. The OAIC will highlight inadequate life-cycle data handling practices, assess how freedom-of-information and privacy requests are managed, and provide guidance to improve administrative decision-making.

Timely access to government information rounds out the OAIC’s priorities. The office will pursue complaint investigations and leverage monitoring data to expose underperformance by individual agencies, particularly those with high refusal rates or failures to comply with statutory timeframes.

Freedom of Information Commissioner Toni Pirani stressed that transparency underpins a healthy democracy: “Access to information promotes government transparency and is essential to our democratic system.”

Article Topics

Age Assurance Technology Trial  |  Australia  |  biometric identifiers  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  data protection  |  facial recognition  |  Office of the Information Commissioner (OAIC)