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The Department of Home Affairs did not respond to questions about the proposal, and the attorney general’s office, when asked to comment on the legal ramifications of the system, directed all questions to Home Affairs.

The proposal comes as a growing number of U.S. cities are debating the use of facial recognition systems in surveillance by police departments, with San Francisco becoming the first major U.S. city this year to ban the technology.

Proponents of the systems say they are an effective public safety tool that should be regulated but not prohibited. Last month, a British court ruled that police use of the systems does not violate privacy and human rights.

At this point, the Australian proposal is merely notional. Parliament has yet to approve a central identity database that the Department of Home Affairs wants to use in a national face-matching system. The system could be used to identify criminal suspects whose images are captured on surveillance cameras.

But it is an indication of the ambitions that the department — which oversees all of Australia’s intelligence and national security agencies — harbours for facial recognition technology as it has moved to expand its surveillance powers in the two years since the agency was created.

The department made its proposal in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into proposals for online age verification for pornography and gambling.

The effort echoes a move by Britain — which was ultimately dropped — to begin requiring commercial providers of online pornography to verify that their users are 18 or over. The initiative spurred widespread privacy complaints, though the government cited technical gaps that allowed users to bypass verification methods and concerns over cyberattacks in shelving the plan.