Since last week, the Madurai City Police in Tamil Nadu have been using a facial recognition application in a bid to nab potential criminals roaming around, especially in the night. The police claimed that with the rising number of chain snatching, mobile snatching, burglaries, and robberies, it has “given importance to vehicle checking, patrolling in crime prone areas and crime prone hours of the day”. However, when we reached out to Madurai City Police Commissioner Prem Anand Sinha, asking why only a facial recognition app can perhaps help them, he declined to comment. News agency ANI first reported the Madurai City Police using FaceTagr. This isn’t the first time that a police department has used FaceTagr’s facial recognition tool. The Chennai police has been using it for several years, and had also caused controversy when it was seen scanning faces of people protesting against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act earlier this year. Apart from that, NotionTag Technologies, the parent company of FaceTagr, had also developed a facial recognition based quarantine monitoring app which was being used by several police stations in Tamil Nadu. How the police plans to use the app Sinha informed MediaNama that earlier, the police used to carry out fingerprint matching of people it suspected. However, that was a long and cumbersome process. “How do you know if someone roaming around in the night is a criminal? To reduce the harassment faced by people [who’re not criminals], we decided to start using this app”, Sinha told us.…
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