Advertisement
India
AsiaSouth Asia

India plans to adopt China-style facial recognition in policing, despite having no data privacy laws

  • India will open bids next month to build a facial recognition system, in an attempt to assist its understaffed police force
  • But the project is ringing alarm bells in a nation with no data privacy laws which just shut down the internet for the last seven weeks in Kashmir

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
A screen demonstrates facial-recognition technology at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China. Photo: Bloomberg
Bloomberg
India is planning to set up one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems, potentially a lucrative opportunity for surveillance companies and a nightmare for privacy advocates who fear it will lead to an Orwellian state.
Advertisement
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government will open bids next month to build a system to centralise facial recognition data captured through surveillance cameras across India. It would link up with databases containing records for everything from passports to fingerprints to help India’s depleted police force identify criminals, missing people and dead bodies.
The government says the move is designed to help one of the world’s most understaffed police forces, which has one officer for every 724 citizens – well below global norms. It also could be a boon for companies: TechSci Research estimates India’s facial recognition market will grow sixfold by 2024 to US$4.3 billion, nearly on par with China.

But the project is also ringing alarm bells in a nation with no data privacy laws and a government that just shut down the internet for the last seven weeks in the key state of Kashmir to prevent unrest. While India is still far from implementing a system that matches China’s ability to use technology to control the population, the lack of proper safeguards opens the door for abuses.
Artificial intelligence and facial recognition are used in dense crowd spatial-temporal technology. Photo: AFP
Artificial intelligence and facial recognition are used in dense crowd spatial-temporal technology. Photo: AFP

“We’re the only functional democracy which will set up such as system without any data protection or privacy laws,” said Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based lawyer and executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group whose members successfully lobbied the government in 2015 to ensure net neutrality and reject platforms like Facebook’s Free Basics. “It’s like a gold rush for companies seeking large unprotected databases.”

Advertisement

A draft data protection bill presented to the government last year still has not been approved by the cabinet or introduced into parliament. The country has already had problems implementing Aadhaar, one of the world’s biggest biometric databases linking everything from bank accounts to income tax filings, which been plagued by reports of data leaks and the growth of a black market for personal information.

So far, not much is known about which companies might bid on the facial-recognition system. Minutes of a meeting with potential bidders, obtained by the Internet Freedom Foundation through a right to information request, showed unidentified companies sought clarifications on integrating facial recognition data with state databases and whether it should be able to identify people with plastic surgery.

Advertisement