India is well on its way to implement the world’s largest facial recognition program. The last date of tender submission for the National Automated Facial Recognition System, AFRS for short, is barely 16 days away. The AFRS is the initiative of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which comes under the purview of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The bidding process commenced on July 8 and will accept offers until November 8. The results will be declared on Nov. 8.
According to the NCRB’s 172-page memo, “This is an effort to modernize and unify the nation’s police forces by creating a single database. This initiative will help with identifying criminals, gathering information, verification, and cooperation between various law enforcement agencies”. The program will benefit the Home Ministry and the NCRB to track and nab known criminals.
Apart from tracking down criminals, the program will also help with identifying missing people, children and unclaimed dead bodies around the country. AFRS will be tasked with detecting crime patterns and identifying the modus operandi of criminals across India. The software will then share the information with the local law enforcement officers, helping their efforts in crime prevention.
The most reliable facial recognition programs currently used worldwide include Amazon’s Rekognition, Lambda Lab’s Face Recognition and Face Detection, Google’s Cloud Vision, Microsoft’s Face API, and IBM’s Watson Visual Recognition. China has its own lineup of applications like Megvii, CloudWalk, SenseTime, and Yitu. During the trial run in India last April, the Delhi Police identified almost 3,000 missing children in four days using a facial recognition system.
Like with any new technology, there are concerns related to its misuse. According to a statement issued recently to IANS, Pavan Duggal, one of India’s top cyber law experts said, “The Information Act, 2000 does not have a specific law governing the use of facial recognition. The first casualty of the lack of governance will be people’s right to privacy”.
“India does not yet have a framework or regulatory body to govern the storage of facial recognition data. Some of the stalwarts in the area like Amazon and Microsoft also agree that the use of facial recognition needs to be governed. Microsoft’s President Brad Smith has urged the government to form legislation regarding the use of facial recognition technology. According to Smith in his new book titled ‘Tools and Weapons’, “The IT veterans need to step up their game and address the challenges regarding regulatory norms”.
“Considering the technology’s potential for abuse, governments around the world need to start creating laws in 2019”, Smith said in an interview last year. “Unless we act now, we risk having to deal with the liabilities of facial recognition technologies five years into the future”. Smith had further warned in a blog. In his statement, last December, Smith added, “The mass scale use of facial recognition technology by the governments will inevitably invade people’s civil rights”. Amazon came out in support of Rekognition, its facial recognition software, which has been successfully used to identify criminals in the past.
According to the official statement released by the NCRB, “The AFRS will dramatically reduce crime rates in India by automatically identifying people of interest from digital photographs, sketches, video frames, and CCTV footage and comparing their facial features against the existing database. Facial recognition software is an essential tool for identifying criminals, missing children and people. It assists the investigating officers by providing the correct information and technology before it is too late”.
UP NEXT: China home to most startups with over $ 1 billion evaluation, U.S second and India third
