China is ramping up its application of Face Recognition Technology (FRT) to crackdown on its Uighur minority community. A report by Harwell and Duo for the Washington Post titled –“Huawei tested AI software that could recognize Uighur minorities and alert police,” documents the face-scanning system developed in China that can trigger a ‘Uighur alarm’ enabling authorities to apprehend and arrest those from the Uighur community. Huawei is China’s biggest telecommunications company and works in close alignment with the Chinese government.
It is alleged that Huawei collaborated with technology startup Megvii to “test an artificial-intelligence camera system that could scan faces in a crowd and estimate each person’s age, sex and ethnicity.” Huawei denies the allegations and insists that they only supply general-purpose products for this kind of testing and do not provide custom algorithms or applications. However, AI researchers and human rights activists say that there is a clear and present danger of the spread and adoption of these technologies by regressive governments to detect members of ethnic groups and conduct their political repression.
In a story that appeared on the news portal medianama.com, – “Delhi Police working on arming PCR vans with facial recognition software”, Aditi Agrawal reports – “The Delhi Police is in the process of equipping its beat cops and Police Control Room (PCR) vehicles with remote facial recognition systems. This way, both local cops and first responders will be able to scan people’s faces using remote devices and run them against Delhi Police’s databases.”
The Ministry of Home Affairs India has also started work on building a National Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) via its National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The estimated budget for the project is Rs 308 crores. The RFP (Request for Proposal) on the NCRB website says – “The Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) to be implemented would help in automatic identification and verification based on digital images, photos, digital sketches, video frames and video sources by comparison of selected facial features of the image from the existing crime and criminal databases. Facial Recognition System is a great investigation enhancer for the identification of criminals, missing children/persons, unidentified dead bodies and unknown traced children/persons. It can provide Investigating Officers of the Civil Police with the required tools, technology, and information. This would greatly facilitate the investigation of crime and detection of criminals and provide information for easier and faster analysis.”
FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
A facial recognition system utilises biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video. It compares that information to match it with a database of known faces. Some of the basic steps involved in facial recognition capturing your face from an image or video. Your image could be captured even from a crowd while you are at the airport or in a mall or even walking on the street. The geometry of your face is read. The key parameters are the distance between your eyes and the distance between the forehead and the chin.
The software is programmed to identify facial landmarks the number of which can even reach 68 and even more as the technology advances. These facial landmarks are the unique identifiers that distinguish your face from others and give it a unique identity. The overall data from this process of scanning is your digital signature. The facial signature is a mathematical formula and can be compared with databases of other facial signatures. The post-COVID 19 global facial recognition market size is expected to grow from USD 3.8 billion in 2020 to USD 8.5 billion by 2025. Many countries are trying to create databases of the faces/digital signatures of their entire population.
FEARS OF MISUSE
The number of countries that have deployed FRT for surveillance is increasing steadily. The growing global trend of building smart cities also means that it is very easy for governments to capture images and videos of their citizens without their express consent. These images can then be processed and matched against databases or added to their repository. Supposing there are political protests as we saw recently in India, the US, Hong Kong to state a few, then authoritarian governments can utilise these cameras for curbing political dissent.
As reported by livemint.com in the story – ‘Delhi violence: Govt using voter ID, driver’s license data to screen rioters’ dated 12 March 2020 – “Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday said that the government used voter ID, driver’s license and other databases to screen people involved in Delhi riots. The minister says 1,100 people have been identified using the technology. “We are using face recognition software to identify people behind the violence. We have also fed Voter ID and driving license data into this software, which has identified 1100 people. Out of these, 300 people came from UP to carry out violence,” Shah said”.
In India, the deployment of these face recognition systems by the government is being challenged by civil society and advocacy groups. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has sent a legal notice to the NCRB. The IFF says that they are concerned about discriminatory profiling and privacy violations and feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg of problems this technology will bring about.
ISLAM UPHOLDS RIGHT TO PRIVACY
There is a Qur’anic injunction in Surah Hujurat (49:12) that expressly prohibits spying and as a corollary upholds the right to privacy. This prohibition of spying is not only applicable to the individuals but also the Islamic government. It cannot probe into the private affairs of its citizens, check curiously into their vices, and then punish them. It is authorised to curb only those evils, which are manifested openly. As for the hidden evils, spying is not the way to reform them but it is education, preaching and counselling, collective training of the people and trying to create a purely social environment.
In this connection, an incident concerning Caliph Umar is very instructive. Once at night, he heard the voice of a person who was singing in his house. He became curious and climbed the wall. There he saw wine and a woman by his side. Umar shouted at the man, saying: “O enemy of God, do you think you will disobey Allah, and Allah will not expose your secret?” The man replied: “Do not make haste, O commander of the faithful: if I have committed one sin, you have committed three sins: Allah has forbidden spying, and you have spied; Allah has commanded that one should enter the houses by the doors, and you have entered it by climbing over the wall; Allah has commanded that one should avoid entering the other people’s houses without permission, and you have entered my house without my permission”. Hearing this reply Caliph Umar confessed his error, and did not take any action against the man.
The search for finding a balance between the security requirements of the state and the personal liberties of its citizens is not an easy one. Facial Recognition Technology is a double-edged sword. It can be correctly used only by a state that is based on virtue and righteousness and not power and aggression.