The importance of Doing No Harm: India’s plan to create a new national facial recognition database

This coming Friday, the government of India is planning to announce the winner of a Request For Proposals to create a large, national, centralized facial recognition system for law enforcement purposes. The tender for the project outlines an ambitious program of facial surveillance in India utilizing image databases that law enforcement officers could access in the field via mobile devices. Regrettably, India does not have a data protection law that would put guardrails in place for this system, and the tender did not propose use restrictions or privacy protections.

In another country, the ambitious plan to construct such a widespread centralized recognition system might be seen as overly optimistic. But India is the country that stood up the Aadhaar national biometric ID in five short years, going from zero enrollees in 2010 to more than a billion enrollees by 2016.

I was present in India in 2010 when the government began enrolling people with iris scans and fingerprints into the Aadhaar system. It was an extraordinary effort, and I’ve not witnessed anything like it before or since. So when a tender for a national facial recognition system is open for bidding in India, I take it seriously, understanding that such a system can potentially be implemented very rapidly.

Similar to Aadhaar, the facial recognition system planned for India is one that will need to be watched very closely. And I repeat the Do No Harm call that I have repeatedly made regarding Aadhaar:

It is important that digital biometric identity systems be used by governments with a Do no Harm mandate, and the establishment of regulatory, enforcement and restorative frameworks ensuring data protection and privacy needs to transpire prior to the implementation of technological programs and services.

India’s proposed national facial recognition system needs privacy and data protection frameworks in place prior to installation. And the system must be used with a Do No Harm mandate and charter. Otherwise, in the context of a national facial recognition system with broad capabilities for real-time surveillance, great harm may indeed occur.

-Pam Dixon, Executive Director

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Original publication date: 6 November 2019

Posted November 6, 2019 in Aadhaar, AI, Biometrics, Digitial Identity, Facial Recognition, Government privacy, Region: India

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
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Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.

The importance of Doing No Harm: India’s plan to create a new national facial recognition database

Related Documents:

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