Without giving much thought to the consequences, the Indian Government has rushed the use of facial recognition tech, seemingly without legal limitations in place.
According to TechCrunch, Amit Shah, Home Minister of India admitted the following:
"The law enforcement agencies deployed a facial recognition system, and fed it with images from government-issued identity cards, driving licenses, and "other databases," to identify alleged culprits in the communal violence in northeast Delhi on February 25 and 26."
"This is a software. It does not see faith. It does not see clothes. It only sees the face and through the face the person is caught," he added.
TechCrunch and a number of other well-informed media have pointed out that the system, despite being employed only last year, has accuracy levels of just 1%, and can't even differentiate between genders. This has led to harsh criticism from some quarters.
"All of this is being done without any clear underlying legal authority and is in clear violation of the Right to Privacy judgment (that the Indian apex court upheld in 2017). Facial recognition technology is still evolving and the risks of such evolutionary tech being used in policing are significant," says Apar Gupta, executive director at Internet Freedom Foundation.