You are reading it here first: The deadline to submit bids for India’s controversial Automated Facial Recognition System has been shifted for the tenth time. The deadline is 5 pm on August 27. The earlier deadline to submit bids was August 6, and the National Crime Records Bureau said that the deadline was extended due to “administrative reasons”. The large scale facial surveillance tool is a centralised web application, and is pegged to be the foundation for “a national level searchable platform of facial images”. The extension comes less than a month after the NCRB held a pre-bid meeting with prospective bidders to answer some of the queries they had about the surveillance tool, which MediaNama had exclusively reported on. The meeting had happened after the NCRB scrapped an original tender document for the project and floated a new one in June. Changes to AFRS’s capabilities While questions had been rightly raised against the privacy concerns of deploying an incessantly invasive surveillance tool at such a large scale, the government had tried addressing some of the challenges in the revised tender. The deployment of the facial recognition tool will neither involve the installation of CCTV cameras nor will it connect to any existing CCTV camera anywhere, under the new tender document. However, while this was a welcome change compared to the old tender, the AFRS is now set to have more searchable attributes. It is envisaged to have a searchable image/visual database of missing persons, unidentified found persons, unidentified dead…
