Mass surveillance fears as India readies facial recognition system

NEW DELHI – As India prepares to install a nationwide facial recognition system in an effort to catch criminals and find missing children, human rights and technology experts on Thursday warned of the risks to privacy from increased surveillance. Use of the camera technology is an effort in "modernizing the police force, information gathering, criminal identification, verification," according to India's national crime bureau. Likely to be among the world's biggest facial recognition systems, the government contract is due to be awarded Friday. But there is little information on where it will be deployed, what the data will be used for and how data storage will be regulated, said Apar Gupta, executive director of non-profit Internet Freedom Foundation. "It is a mass surveillance system that gathers data in public places without there being an underlying cause to do so," he said.