Delhi Police’s use of facial recognition technology

Last Updated23/08/2022

RTI responses received by the Internet Freedom Foundation reveal that the Delhi Police treats matches of above 80% similarity generated by its facial recognition technology (FRT) system as positive results.

The procurement was authorized as per a 2018 direction of the Delhi High Court in Sadhan Haldar vs NCT of Delhi. However, in 2018 itself, the Delhi Police submitted in the Delhi High Court that the accuracy of the technology procured by them was only 2% and “not good”.

Facial recognition is an algorithm-based technology which creates a digital map of the face by identifying and mapping an individual’s facial features, which it then matches against the database to which it has access.
It is a biometric technology that uses distinctive features of the face to identify and distinguish an individual.
FRT has evolved in many ways- from looking at 3D contours of a face to recognizing skin patterns.
In the Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS), the large database is used to match and identify the person.

Authentication: It is used for identification and authentication purposes with a success rate that keeps improving with each iteration.
There are very few police/ law enforcement officers per citizens, this can act as a force multiplier for law and order . It neither requires too much manpower nor regular upgradation.
It can help in investigations and solving many types of hitherto unsolvable crimes.


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.
Violation to Privacy	The Government 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	The data collected may be used in the court of law during the course of a criminal trial, but may not have robust reliability and authenticity.
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.
Issue of misidentification	The accuracy rate of FRT falls starkly based on race and gender. This can result in a false positive, where a person is misidentified as someone else, or a false negative where a person is not verified as themselves. Cases of a false positive result can lead to bias against the individual who has been misidentified.
Cases of false negative results	it can lead to exclusion of the individual from accessing essential schemes which may use FRT as means of providing access.

The Delhi Police has revealed that matches above 80% similarity are treated as positive results while matches below 80% similarity are treated as false positive results which require additional "corroborative evidence".
It is unclear why 80% has been chosen as the threshold between positive and false positive.
Secondly, the categorisation of below 80% results as false positive instead of negative shows that the Delhi Police may still further investigate below 80% results.
This Act allows for wider categories of data to be collected from a wider section of people, Le, "convicts and other persons for the purposes of identification and investigation of criminal matters.
It is feared that the Act will lead to overbroad collection of personal data in violation of internationally recognised best practices for the collection and processing of data.

In a legal vacuum, there are no safeguards to ensure that authorities use FRT only for the purposes that they have been authorised to, as is the case with the Delhi Police.
FRT can enable the constant surveillance of an individual resulting in the violation of their fundamental right to privacy.
So its introduction into law and order and criminal justice system must be debated.