<https://www.ft.com/content/84fcd9b4-e006-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc> Privacy campaigners have attacked plans by India to introduce facial recognition across the country, after the government invited bids for a system that would allow police to try to match people captured by CCTV cameras against a national criminal database. India’s National Crime Records Bureau at the home affairs ministry issued a tender deadline of October 11 for bids to create a system for all state police forces that will enable “fast and accurate face recognition” in a “live environment”. The tender documents call for a system that can take “face images from CCTV feed and generate alerts if a blacklist match is found”. It should also be able to upload photographs from newspapers or sent in by the public, and even artist impressions of suspects to its facial image database. The platform will access images collected by government agencies such as the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Officers in India’s disparate local police forces will be able to search the images through a mobile app, designed to speed up an otherwise tiresome process of sharing information across state lines. A graphic with no description The government did not respond to a request for comment. But in its tender, the NCRB says the programme would bring about a “sea change” in law enforcement. The facial recognition system “can play a very vital role in improving outcomes in the area of criminal identification and verification by facilitating easy recording, analysis, retrieval and sharing of Information between different organisations”, the NCRB said. Police are currently restricted from accessing biometric data from Aadhaar, India’s new national electronic identification system which includes facial images, though law enforcement have previously sought access. The initiative has sparked alarm among privacy advocates who, already skittish at trials of facial recognition cameras in airports and elsewhere, argue that the government is now seeking to create a mass-surveillance tool with little oversight. They pointed to the lack of existing personal data regulation in India to help ensure checks on such a programme and a lack of transparency on its aims. “There’s been no clear discussion besides the tender itself. It makes it difficult to know what the government actually wants to do,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia policy director at Access Now, an open-internet advocacy group. “We’re having this conversation in India with no clear [understanding] of what is the purpose, who’s in charge of it, who do you talk to and where does the buck stop if something goes wrong.” [...]