Indian Railways will be using facial recognition to fight crime by end of 2020

Most major railway stations in India will use facial recognition to fight crime by the end of 2020, a senior official said, in a move that digital rights campaigners on Tuesday warned could breach people's privacy in the absence of stringent laws. The system is being trialled in the tech hub of Bengaluru where about half a million faces are scanned every day and - using artificial intelligence (AI) - matched against faces stored in a police database of criminals. "The railways will become like a virtual fortress," a senior railways official told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Without a physical, brick and mortar boundary wall, we will be able to make the whole system more secure," said the official who declined to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Stretching from the foothills of the Himalayas to sandy southern beaches, India's railway network is one of the biggest in the world, carrying about 23 million people - or the population of Taiwan - every day.