400 million Indians will have to go through facial recognition to access their bank accounts.
More than 400 million people in India who have bank accounts where benefits or various state subsidies are credited will now need to be checked by facial recognition cameras to get their money. This change is being tested as part of the government’s Aadhaar digital identification program and will make facial and iris recognition mandatory for receiving state benefits. The Aadhaar program currently allows citizens to access a range of services, including scholarships, pensions and welfare benefits.
So far, beneficiaries of such benefits received them via ATMs equipped with fingerprint sensors, which will be replaced by iris scanners or facial recognition cameras. To date, four banks are piloting the program with facial recognition cameras for a period of two weeks. The rationale behind this shift towards biometric verification is the coronavirus pandemic, according to the government, which argues that shared fingerprint sensors are a health risk factor. Also, the sensors had an error rate of 20%, because many users have damaged fingerprints due to manual labor.
The two state programs that will use facial and iris recognition are one concerning access to cheap professional loans for over 400 million Indians, and the second is the Direct Welfare Program, which concerns the government’s granting of all kinds of benefits and assistance. The bank accounts associated with these two programs involve the transfer of massive capital. On the other hand, the Aadhaar identification program served over 1 billion beneficiaries in June alone, according to the Indian central bank.
While this change will likely not extract more data from Indians—the government already has the personal data of 1.2 billion citizens through Aadhaar—it will, however, contribute to establishing facial and iris recognition technologies permanently within the state’s digital infrastructure.
Certainly, the facial recognition data collected by Aadhaar also relates to broader surveillance conditions. The Indian government had a plan, which it is not known whether it was implemented, to use Aadhaar’s massive database of facial photographs by linking it with thermal camera software or even drones, and then perform facial recognition on those recorded as having elevated body temperature.
The collection, processing, and use of all this data further strengthens digital technology as an indispensable part of how the government monitors and controls citizens. The current change with the banks is nothing more than another step in the Indian government’s plan to make facial recognition a universal norm, and it is not unrelated to recent attempts to intensify the use of this technology in policing or even to allow access to workplaces.
And what is happening now is just the beginning. The banks, for their part, intend to use the photographs they collect from their customers for all kinds of analysis, including the recognition of emotional states, in order to exploit the data they collect to the fullest.
translation: Hurry Tuttle
original title: 400 Million Indians Might Soon Need To Use Facial Recognition To Access Their Bank Accounts