Problems With Facial Recognition Technology | Burning Issues | PDF Download

WHAT JUST HAPPENED ?

• San Francisco, long a vanguard of digital enlightenment
• Recently, it became the first major city to prohibit its police force and government agencies from using facial-recognition technology.

SAN FRANCISCO

• San Francisco, California
• Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology, innovation and social media.

WHY THE BAN

• The ban is part of a bill that restricts surveillance technologies. The measure also orders San Francisco agencies to describe any current or future facial recognition activities.
• Use of facial recognition technology by government agencies across the U.S. has continually increased over the past 10 years. The machine-learning methods that power the technology have also greatly improved in recent years.
• Privacy groups supporting the ban argue that facial recognition systems make too many mistakes and can violate personal rights.
• For example, they say failures of the technology to correctly recognize race could violate a person’s civil rights. Several studies have shown the technology can have difficulties correctly guessing a person’s race.

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE UNEASY WITH THIS?

CHINA FACTOR

WHERE DOES INDIA STAND WITH REGARD TO THIS TECHNOLOGY?

• The San Francisco decision comes as Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport prepares to roll out facial recognition as part of the boarding procedure for passengers later this year.
• The facial biometric programme will be implemented as part of the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s Digi Yatra initiative. Airport operator Bengaluru International Airport Ltd had signed an agreement last year with a Portuguese software firm to implement the technology.
• There is massive potential for both the use and misuse of facial recognition technology in India. This is because the country has the largest verified biometric database of faces in the world, thanks to the Unique Identification Authority of India’s (UIDAI) efforts to capture the data of as many citizens as possible.

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