Right to Privacy Issues GS: 2 "EMPOWER IAS"

 

In news:

• India has seen a rapid deployment of Facial Recognition Systems (FRS) in recent years, both by the Centre and State governments, without putting in place any law to regulate their use.

Facial Recognition System

• A FRS is a technology capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces.
• It is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, works by pinpointing and measuring facial features from a given image.

FRS in India

• Currently, 18 FRSs are in active utilisation by the Centre and State governments for the purpose of surveillance, security and authentication of identity.
• 49 more systems are in the process of being installed by different government agencies.
• Delhi Police was the first law enforcement agency in the country to start using the technology in 2018.
• Only Telangana is ahead of Delhi at present with four facial recognition systems in active utilization for surveillance and authentication of identity.

 

Judicial scrutiny of the move

• States say that they are authorized by the Delhi High Court in terms of the decision in the case of ‘Sadhan Haldar vs NCT of Delhi’.
• In that particular case, the High Court had authorized the Delhi police to obtain facial recognition technology for the purpose of tracking and reuniting missing children.
• FRS may be used in the investigation in the interest of safety and security of the general public.

A potential mis-use?

• Activists pointed out that Delhi Police was now using the FRS, which was meant for tracking missing children, for wider security and surveillance and investigation purpose.
• There is a “function creep” happening with Police gradually using the technology beyond its intended purpose.
• For example, the use of FRS to identify accused who took part in the farmers’ tractor rally violence in January this year.

 

 

Challenges

• • Infrastructural Costs: Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are costly to implement. The size of stored information is extremely large and requires huge network & data storage facilities, which are currently not available in India. Currently, to store the government data from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and other agencies, international cloud servers are used.
  • Image Collection: The sources from which images will be collected to create a repository/database needs to be known. Certain questions also need to be answered:
  • Will the information be collected from social media profiles like- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.?
  • What kind of relationship would it have with the private entities and security agencies?
  • How would that relationship reflect in the terms and conditions, to be fairly transparent, as these images would be made available to enforcement agencies?
  • Security of the Database: In today’s world of cybercrime, there is a dire need to put appropriate safeguards in place in order to ensure the integrity of the repository/database, so that it doesn’t leak out the information and is not privatized or monetized.
  • Also, International & domestic accessibility interests need to be properly addressed.
  • Required Expertise: The collected data from social media profiles where anybody can put anybody’s image, puts to risk the authenticity of the data. Hence, experts are needed to verify such details before storing them who should be provided proper training to protect & avoid abuse and misuse of the collected data & database.
  • Reliability & Authenticity: As the data collected may be used in the court of law during the course of a criminal trial, the reliability and the admissibility of the data along with standards and procedure followed would be taken into consideration. Hence, the authenticity of the data is crucial.
  • Right to Privacy: Government although plans to address the question of privacy through the legal framework like data privacy regime, but keeping in mind the objectives it aims to achieve with the use of such technology, it comes into conflict with one another.
  • In the absence of data protection laws, Indian citizens become more vulnerable to privacy abuses. As it is sensitive data, it has tremendous potential of being misused.
  • Hence, the constitutional mandate of right to privacy needs to be safeguarded along with the nature of technology, addressing the fears of invasion & surveillance.
  • Inherent Challenges: Over the time, the face may have different-different facets, for example, somebody has grown a beard, or the age has changed from the last taken photo, or somebody might have covered the face so as to escape from getting captured in the CCTVs. This becomes one of the challenging tasks to overcome.
  • However, it is claimed that such things are taken care of by the software, making it one of the best ways to recognize a person.