India has been witnessing a trend in the deployment of facial recognition technology for several purposes such as surveillance and more recently, in a vaccine registration pilot. Facial recognition technology (FRT) will not be integrated with Aadhaar, but the technology will be used as one of the authentication procedures with 'informed consent of the individual', informed Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar in response to a question asked in Parliament. "UIDAI is only developing the Aadhaar based Face Authentication as which is currently in Proof of Concept (PoC) phase," Chandrasekhar said in response to a question by Abhishek Banerjee, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew and a Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha MP from Diamond Harbour constituency. "Face authentication may be used as one of the authentication mechanisms apart from biometric and iris-based authentication procedures with the informed consent of the individual," Chandrasekhar added. Why it matters? There has been a spurt in the Indian government's and various state governments' use of facial recognition. While many such applications of facial recognition are for management purposes such as recording attendances, the use of this technology for surveillance purposes by the police is also prevalent. Several police outfits such as the Kolkata Police use this technology for surveillance purposes and crime detection. However, its uses have been debated since the Right to Privacy was declared a fundamental right in the country, and the nation still does not have a data protection law. Chandrasekhar touched on the privacy aspect in…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...