Facial recognition

Passengers will be able to use a face scan as their boarding pass at four airports (Varanasi, Pune, Kolkata and Vijayawada) in the country from 2022.

What is the plan?

• The NEC Corporation Private Limited has been chosen by the Airport Authority of India to implement the project.
• The details of face recognition data are to be stored in Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem.
• To avail the service, the passenger has to send PNR, pax details and facial biometrics to the Biometric Boarding System of the departing airport through a mobile application. The passenger can also choose not to opt for the service.
• The Facial recognition is to be done using software designed by National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Part of Digi Yatra Policy

• The project is to be implemented as part of Digi Yatra Policy.
• This policy is being implemented by the Ministry of Civil Aviation.
• Under this, the ministry aims to provide biometric based digital processing of passengers at airports.
• This helps the passengers to walk through the security scanners swiftly.
• It removes redundancies and enhances resource utilization.

Challenges

Infrastructural Costs

• Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are costly to implement.
• The size of stored information is extremely large and requires huge network & data storage facilities, which are currently not available in India.

Violation to Privacy

• Government although plans to address the question of privacy through the legal framework like data privacy regime, but keeping in mind the objectives it aims to achieve with the use of such technology, it comes into conflict with one another.

Reliability & Authenticity

• As the data collected may be used in the court of law during the course of a criminal trial, the reliability and the admissibility of the data along with standards and procedure followed would be taken into consideration.

Absence of Data Protection Law

• FRT systems in the absence of data protection laws that would mandate necessary safeguards in the collection and storage of user data is also a point of concern.