Waking up on India's First Legal Challenge to the deployment of Facial Recognition Technology

The Telangana high court issued notices on Monday to the state and Hyderabad police commissioner to respond to a PIL questioning the alleged use of face recognition technology (FRT) by officials without the sanction of law. Petitioner claims that the continued use of facial recognition technology by the police violates the privacy of individuals which was upheld by the Supreme Court’s Aadhaar judgment. The use of such technology without any authorization from the law should be declared unconstitutional and illegal.

And we need to follow this case in close quarters because without Personal Data Privacy Act & Data Protection Authority this case can become the case law to follow for legality concerning facial recognition Technology & the ambit of surveillance by the government & police.

As reported there are currently 16 different facial recognition tracking (FRT) systems in active utilization by various Central and State governments across India for surveillance, security, or authentication of identity. Another 17 are in the process of being installed by different government departments. In 2018, the Delhi police became one of the first law enforcement agencies in the country to start using the technology. It, however, declined to answer a Right to Information (RTI) query on whether it had conducted a “privacy impact assessment” prior to deployment of the facial recognition system (FRS). Delhi police got permission to use the FRS by an order of the Delhi High Court for tracking missing children. “Now they are using it for wider security and surveillance and investigation purpose, which is a function creep." pointed out by IFF ( Internet Freedom Foundation ). A function creep happens when someone uses information for a purpose that is not the originally specified purpose.

Delhi police, with the help of an automated facial recognition system (AFRS), was comparing the details of people involved in violence during the anti-Citizenship Act protests in Jamia Millia Islamia with a data bank of more than two lakh ‘anti-social elements. The function has widened at the back end and we don’t actually know for what purpose they might be using it and how they are being regulated and if there is any regulation at all. This might lead to an over-policing problem or problems where certain minorities are targeted without any legal backing or any oversight as to what is happening. Another problem that may arise is mass surveillance, wherein the police are using the FRT system during protests.

?Supposedly If someone goes to a protest against the government, and the police are able to identify the person, then there might be repercussions. This obviously has a chilling effect on the individual’s freedom of speech and expression and right to protest as well as my right to movement”. This leads to mass tracking. That 100% accuracy in finding matches has not been achieved under this technology.

In case an inaccurate system is installed, two things can happen. There can be a ‘false positive’ wherein somebody is recognized as somebody they are not or a ‘false negative’ wherein the system refuses to recognize the person as themselves. These FRT systems are being developed and deployed across India without any legal framework in place, which creates a lot of problems.

?If We are caught hold off by the police through the FRT system, What do We do?? What are our remedies? There is no framework in place where We can even question them.

And recently on that note, Delhi became India's most surveillance City through CCTVs & Telengana is following the trend of Delhi with blanket surveillance. According to news reports, the Telangana Police has been deploying FRT across the State of Telangana in the form of FRT enabled-CCTV Cameras which enable mass identification of individuals in real-time. To that end, the State of Telangana has installed 5,80,000 CCTV cameras in public spaces. Apart from FRT-enabled-CCTV cameras, the State of Telangana has also provided tablets/mobile phones to police officers on the ground which have the ‘TSCOP’ application. The application allows these officers to take a photograph and seek a match with an existing database. The images captured either on CCTV or through the TSCOP application are compared with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System database maintained by the Ministry of Home Affairs as well as other databases maintained by the State of Telangana.

It's alarming that India is facing a facial recognition pandemic — one without any safeguards or remedies for the harms of exclusion, profiling, and surveillance. Without urgent action, such systems of mass surveillance will erode democratic liberties and threaten the rights of millions of citizens.

Suggestive Sources: The Hindu, Internet Freedom Foundation, The Times of India?