On a chilly November night, Balaram was moving on a two-wheeler when he was stopped at a vehicle checkpoint by cops in Thiruvallur district. The cops felt something was amiss, their intuition told them Balaram was a potential criminal. They clicked a picture of his face and fed it into a facial recognition app available to them. Indeed, Balaram was present on the criminal database, and had been booked on charges of theft and robbery. He was arrested. “We caught him [Balaram] during the night earlier in the month while the beat cops under the jurisdiction of Arani Police Station were conducting vehicle checking. Balaram was driving a two wheeler, and the police stopped him, scanned his face and the app returned with his previous criminal history which was present in our database,” Aravindhan P, Superintendent of Police at the Thiruvallur district in Tamil Nadu told MediaNama. The facial recognition app used by the police is called FaceTagr. Several other police jurisdictions in Tamil Nadu also have access to this app. Most notably, 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. This is also in line with how police departments across the country are using facial recognition systems to identify potential criminals (here's how the Delhi Police and Telangana Police go about it). Aravindhan told us that police in his district has been using the app for…
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Tamil Nadu Police nab criminal using face recognition app, questions of safeguards and accountability remain
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