Governments, corporations, and private institutions are quietly rolling out these technologies with promises of greater ‘security’, ‘convenience’, and ‘efficiency’.

Australia is quickly descending into an Orwellian nightmare, but there is still always a way to navigate, Ethan Nash explores.

DIGITAL ID GOES LIVE

We are now in the wake of a new epochal revolution, the Information Revolution. It took many centuries to complete the agricultural transition and Industrial Revolution.

The Information Revolution, instead, is progressing at the rate of decades.

Information, although being something that has existed forever, is now a powerful commodity for exchange used by governments, advertisers, the media, and criminals.

Personal data was a type of new-age gold that most didn’t realise they were giving away with the rise of the internet, and as we enter 2025, your sensitive biometric information is targeted to be the new frontier in a marketplace of information sharing.

A primary example of this point is the frantic push to get national digital identification up-and-running, and Australia’s long-envisioned program has now gone live.

The Digital ID Bill 2024 went live on 1 December 2024. As part of a framework known as the “Trust Exchange”, we will soon see the rise of the ‘Trusted Digital Identity Framework’, designed to ‘securely verify people’s identities using virtual passkeys’.

The amendment was pushed through with little-to-no-debate in typical dystopian fashion – a hallmark we have witnessed with other landscape-shifting pieces of legislation, such as ‘anti-terrorism’ measures in recent years.

The scheme already has several privacy issues, especially when compared to international standards like those in the European Union.

Despite this, as 2025 rolls on, Digital ID credentials will be integrated into Australia’s government services app, myGov, which will be the centralised hub for this scheme.

The app, currently a one-stop-shop for government services, will see the incorporation of ‘passkeys’ – assigned to each citizen and ‘accredited’ with biometric markers.

And, so there was no confusion between myGov (the services app) and myGovID (Digital ID credentials to log in), the latter was renamed myID in mid-November.

After trialling the option on the application for years, myID – now underpinned by this legislation – will eventually serve biometric barrier to access government services like the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Medicare and Centrelink.

Slowly, over time, your biometric ‘passkeys’ may be the only way to gain access to many facets of modern life, in an ever-increasing digital world.

And government services are not the only thing you will have to scan your face for moving forward, as both public and private enterprise capitalise on the technology.

FACIAL RECOGNITION EVERYWHERE

Facial recognition CCTV capabilities have quietly begun to permeate nearly every facet of modern life in recent years, under the guise of ‘safety’ and ‘security’.

The mass surveillance it enables as a result, experts warn, is quickly become one of the most ethically challenging legal conundrums to ever been confronted.

At the end of last year, Australians were exposed to the story of unlawful surveillance by retail giant Bunnings, who were found to have recorded the facial data of hundreds of thousands of people without their consent over a three-year period to 2021.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) ruled Bunnings breached privacy laws in doing so, after leading consumer advocacy group CHOICE referred the organisation – as well as Kmart and The Good Guys – to the OAIC in 2022.

These are just some examples of how private companies are also utilising the rise of biometric tracking, and unfortunately, we don’t know how many others are as well.

From pubs and clubs, to football stadiums, airports and public transport systems, a mass surveillance framework has arrived – and these are just the groups that have publicly been revealed. Sadly, most just don’t understand what they are giving away.

Biometrics – including the monitoring of facial features from CCTV – are fundamentally different from passwords in that they are fixed identifiers that can’t be replaced or reset.

While a password reset can re-secure a compromised account, biometrics present a unique, lifelong risk. If someone gains unauthorised access to your biometric data, you could face enduring vulnerabilities to impersonation, fraud, and data theft.

And, beyond many of the threats we know and experience at present, an entirely new realm of concern is waiting around the corner as technology itself advances further.

What happens when this sensitive personal data is weaponised against you?