Public services card contractor objected to previous tender process

Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe registers for a public services card with the Department of Social Protection. Picture: Gareth Chaney 

A company contracted by the Government to design and implement facial image matching software for the public services card had previously objected to a tender process for the manufacture of the public services card as being unfair.

Gemalto, a Dutch company and then world leader in the production of security cards and SIM technology with more than €3bn in turnover in 2017, secured the €383,000 contract for the design of the image-matching software in August 2018.

However, in April of the same year the company, in tandem with an Irish producer of security card products, had objected in writing to the department regarding the €9.4m contract to produce the second generation of the public services card.

Asked whether or not Gemalto’s objection to the card production contract had had any effect on its bid for the updated facial recognition tender, the department had not responded at the time of publication.

Gemalto said that in its opinion the request for tender for the public services card 2 had been drafted so as to make its criteria impossible to satisfy for all but the incumbent manufacturer, a situation which eventually transpired. The tender was awarded to the holder of the previous contract, namely Biometric Card Services, since renamed as Security Card Concepts.

Gemalto itself was bought out by French aerospace multinational Thales Group in April 2019.

The contract in question was to last for three years. Gemalto was the sole bidder.

Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy said that she has serious concerns regarding the various tender processes surrounding the public services card
with regard to the Gemalto contract.

“As we know the Data Protection Commission made a determination that a number of aspects relating to the public services card are illegal. The issues surrounding the tender process cast further doubts on the merits of the overall project,” she said.

Facial recognition technology has attracted a great deal of controversy in recent years due to perceived data protection issues.

The processing of biometric data, that is the identification of people via their physical characteristics such as that captured in a photograph, is expressly forbidden by the EU’s marquee General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018, unless consent to such processing is freely given. However, consent is deemed irrelevant when accessing State services, due to the imbalance in power of the State and those seeking to access those services.

The Department of Social Protection has long maintained that no biometric data is processed by the use of the public services card, with rather the claim espoused that an “arithmetic template” of a citizen’s data is used for identity verification for the access of welfare services and benefits.

The department has previously stated that the Gemalto/Thales software is used to cross-reference photos of public services card applicants against its own photo database “to ensure that the person in that photograph has not already been registered using a different personal public service number or a different identity dataset”.

An investigation report into the biometric nature or otherwise of the card was due to be published by the  Data Protection Commission by the end of 2019, but has yet to see the light of day.