Singapore's world-first face scan plan sparks privacy fears
Singapore will become the world's first country to use facial verification in its national ID scheme, but privacy advocates are alarmed by what they say can be an intrusive system vulnerable to abuse.
From next year, millions of men and women moving into the city-state will be able to access government agencies, banking services, and other amenities with a quick face scan.
This biometric check will do away with the necessity to remember a password or security dongle when performing many everyday tasks, its creators say.
It is the main financial hub's drive to harness technology, from ramping up the utilization of electronic payments to analyze on driverless transport.
"We want to be innovative in applying technology for the benefit for our citizens and businesses," Kwok Quek Sin, who works on digital identification at Singapore's technology agency GovTech, told AFP.
Facial verification was already adopted in a variety of forms around the world, with Apple and Google implementing the technology for tasks like unlocking phones and making payments.
Governments also have deployed it at airports for security checks on travelers.
But Singapore's rollout is one of the most ambitious yet, and the first-ever to attach facial verification to a national identification database.
The technology captures a number of photos of a person's face in a variety of lights.
These images are matched with other data already available to the government such as for example national identity cards, passports and employment passes.
Safeguards ensure the process is secure, said Lee Sea Lin of digital consultancy Toppan Ecquaria, which is dealing with GovTech to implement the technology.
"We want to have the assurance that the individual behind the device is a genuine person... and that it's not an image or a video," Lee said.
The technology is being integrated into the country's digital identity scheme and has been trialed now at some government offices, like the tax authority and the city's pension fund.
Private firms can sign up to the initiative, and Singapore's biggest bank DBS is part of the trial.
Face scanning technology remains controversial despite its growing use and critics have raised ethical concerns about any of it in some countries -- for example, police agencies scanning crowds most important events to consider troublemakers.
Singapore authorities are frequently accused of targeting government critics and going for a hard line on dissent, and activists are worried about how the face-scanning tech will be used.
"There are no clear and explicit restraints on government power in terms of things like surveillance and data gathering," said Kirsten Han, a freelance journalist from the town.
"Will we 1 day discover that this data is in the hands of the authorities or in the hands of various other agencies that people didn't specifically give consent for?"
Those behind the Singapore scheme stress facial verification is different from recognition since it requires user consent, but privacy advocates remain skeptical.
"The technology continues to be definitely not benign," Privacy International research officer Tom Fisher told AFP.
He said systems like the one planned for Singapore left "opportunities for exploitation", such as for example utilization of data to track and profile people.
Kwok of GovTech insisted that no data will be distributed to third parties and users would be left with other options, such as for example personal passwords, to access services.
"It is not surveillance," he said. "Utilization is quite specific."
Source: japantoday.com
