A government-sponsored facial recognition surveillance system, billed as India’s largest such effort to date, is proposing to detect faces when covered with masks, or even modified by plastic surgery.
According to a fresh tender issued last week by the National Crime Records Bureau, a body under the Home Ministry, the surveillance tool will process more than a crore facial images, and will also integrate with existing centralised crime databases like CCTNS. The requirement to detect faces with masks comes despite several studies repeatedly showing.
The Delhi-based digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation called the system “Illegal”, emphasising that facial recognition systems in the country currently have no basis in law.
[Via]
