Solar Victoria, the site where Victorians claim on the solar rebate scheme, launched a trial of smartphone-based facial recognition technology at the start of July. Credit:New York Times This does not look too different from a 100-point paper-based identity check, so why all the fuss? Part of the fuss is because it does not work well. There are reports that 40 per cent of attempts failed in the first two weeks and of people in tears because the system would not recognise them. But the central issue should not be what if it works badly, but what if it works well? A paper-based ID system is inefficient to copy. That inefficiency is a form of data protection. It's really difficult to pass large amounts of paper data around, to hack it, or to collect it into "Big Data" that can be interrogated for patterns of behaviour. This matters because large amounts of data, when analysed, can pin down your own individual behaviour, moods, wishes and preferences. When stacked up with each other, grouped datasets can re-identify previously de-identified data.

Loading If paper-based information is digitised, controls over its replication and use become far more important. What assurances does the government give on what will be done with the solar rebate data? Bank account details are covered by a direct debit service agreement not with Solar Victoria but with the State Trustee, even though the information for it is collected on Solar Victoria's website. Where documents are uploaded, they must be photographed by smartphone. No protections are offered by the government other than the occasional promise they won't collect any other information from them and won't retain the documents. For ID documents, "You'll use a smartphone to securely scan documents and match them to your face". This is on page 13 of a 16-page application. No warning is given that facial recognition will be used until this point. Even here, the term "facial recognition" is not used. Nor is there a consent form or reference to what might be done subsequently with that data.

Loading One thing we do know is that the Victorian government is trying to have this system accredited with the federal government’s Trusted Digital Identity Framework. This links government identity collection agencies with each other so they are interoperable. It seamlessly joins up internal government identity data held on all of us from our transactions with its various agencies. But governments don't need to go to all the trouble of collecting and managing big data themselves. They can use the data and the infrastructure created by the digital companies you know – Facebook and Google – and the digital companies you don't – third-party databrokers. The latter are commercial exchangers of data and datasets on anything they can buy, from personal credit card information to political preferences. In this fashion, governments are both creating and participating in a global data market. But this depends on understanding Australians as both a product and a consumer of that product. The project to use facial recognition to qualify for Victorian solar panels was initiated in the same month that the ACCC put out a 623-page report identifying Google and Facebook's market power combined with their big data power and their media reach as a problem for consumers.

Loading As a regulator, the ACCC imagines the problem as one of how to curb digital market power as it affects primarily commercial competitors and ultimately us as digital customers. But we are not mere consumers, we are also citizens and need protection as citizens from (literal as well as figurative) unwarranted government surveillance. "Open government" should mean opening up the government to the citizen by improving government transparency, not opening up the citizen to the government by increasing citizen surveillance and control. But governments are closing our accessibility to their activities just as fast as they are opening up their access to ours. Who minds about people as digital citizens, not just as digital consumers? Who is protecting us from the excesses of governments that indulge in abuses of their own digital powers that rival those of Google and Facebook? And what is the endpoint? When will we have given away enough about ourselves to accomplish whatever the government thinks should be accomplished by sucking up our behaviours and our biodata? We don't have any idea what the question is that more data will answer. Just as we entered the Iraq war with no idea of what winning was, and so kept changing the goal posts, so the goals of digital hoovering are likely to twist and mutate in favour of assuring whatever political end suits the politics of the time, including staying in power, whatever it takes.