Hyderabad: A few days ago, on December 23, Osmania University was the scene of a massive protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Thousands of people turned up at the location from all over the city.
As a precautionary measure, several policemen were stationed there to prevent any untoward incident and were preventing people from entering apart from sealing and manning most exit and entry points, demanding ID proof before allowing people in.
However, there was something that had unnerved some protesters: the police were recording and scanning the faces of some of them. They are unnerved about these photographs being fed into Hyderabad police's facial recognition system.
Many protesters who were at the event on the day said they saw policemen with hand-held cameras recording them when they were entering. The police chose to focus on a few faces, not all. A journalist who was covering the event said, “I was at the NCC gate that day. There were some policemen who had point-and-shoot cameras in their hands. They were taking videos of everyone coming in. They were focusing on the faces of some of them.” S. Sudhakar, assistant commissioner of police (ACP), Kachiguda, confirmed that the policemen were indeed taking videos of the protest.
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Sudhakar said, “There were a lot of people coming to the protest. We took videos and photographs to keep track of everyone who came there. If people had valid student ID cards, we didn't insist on photographs.” He indicated that the photographs would serve to track persons causing trouble. He added that the media gets deleted by the end of the day if nothing happens.
However, the public is not convinced. Indeed, in the recent past, since Hyderabad police procured and started using facial recognition tools, some sections of the society have criticised them.
They have asked how the police can be trusted with photographs and videos of citizens and whether they could be trusted to delete them. Srinivas Kodali, an independent cyber-researcher, said, “According to existing legal provisions, police cannot collect biometric details of people, even with their consent. Also, current laws don't say anything about facial recognition.”
Kodali said it was important for the people to know what happens to the photographs and videos in the police’s possession.
It may be noted that the draft Data Protection Bill mentions facial recognition for the first time. It gives the government the ability to notify conditions in which facial and biometric tools may be used.
Meanwhile, ACP, Sudhakar, said, “A lot of students from the city turned up. Many of them said they were students of UoH, but didn't have any ID card to prove this. How are we trust them? So we took their pictures as a precaution. We have to track all the people, right? It is very likely that some other elements might come in claiming to be students. But rest assured, these photographs and videos that we took of the students are not archived and deleted at the end of the day.”
He also admitted the policemen under his jurisdiction used facial recognition tools. He was referring to the application TSCOP which has facial and fingerprint details of known criminals “Often, people move at odd hours on the roads. Some of them rarely have any identification on them. What can we do then? We run their faces in our application to match them with known offenders. If the faces don't match, we delete the photographs immediately,” he said.
Sudhakar said the way these people “moving on the road at odd hours are stopped for checks is based on police intuition. "Our policemen get doubts seeing some people. We stop only those people,” he said. He added that the tool had helped them nab a few offenders. “Our men have caught some offenders moving on the roads using this tool,” he said.
