Facial Recognition Technology has recently been introduced into India. This technology uses the digital representation of an individual’s face to identify the individual, or even gain access to an individual’s phone and other technological gadgets.
How does Facial Recognition Technology work?
Facial images are captured through CCTV cameras, driver’s license, and even social media pictures. The images are sent to an existing database.
From this database, a person’s face can easily be matched and identified. As such, this technology is vital in aiding the Police to identify suspects.
Problems Posed by this Technology-
Although this technology is vital for Police and security purposes, it also poses a form of invasion into the personal space of individuals within India.
This is because, your movement and entire privacy can be easily tracked, and your face easily identified.
The resultant effect is an encroachment on an individual’s fundamental right to freedom of expression, personal liberty, movement, etc.
Presently, there are no rules in place to safeguard the government’s use of this invasive technology and data. There are no checks in place to tackle the abuse or misuse of data from the law enforcement authorities.
Also, as wonderful as the technology sounds, it is not infallible. From a research conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is reported that there has been a record of consistent misidentification of faces by the facial recognition algorithms.
One survey showed that 30% of the time, the technology identified some very dark-skinned women as men.
The effect of this is that an individual may be wrongly identified as a suspect, and could be wrongly jailed.
Some other complaints about the technology stem from the biases inherent in Artificial Intelligence, on which this technology performs.
In view of the above, it becomes imperative that this technology be subjected to strict and thorough Parliamentary scrutiny. It is also imperative to place a framework that will ensure accountability and transparency in the use of data gotten from this technology.
