Privacy at risk with face-tracking tech

Facial recognition systems to monitor student attendance can expose personal data to breaches.

It is reported that facial recognition and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology will be used for tracking the attendance of students across schools and colleges that are run or aided by the Government of Karnataka. This is a risky move that threatens to violate the right to privacy of the students; critically, it also fails to
address the core issues behind irregular attendance
of students.

The biggest concern with this project is that it violates the fundamental right to privacy. In Justice K S Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the Supreme Court of India held “right to privacy” as being a part of the Fundamental Rights. The right to privacy may be limited by a procedure that is established by law, which is fair, reasonable and just.

In the present case of technology adoption, a fair procedure has not been followed. The consent of the students whose rights are at the risk of violation has not been obtained. School students are minors and they do not have the capacity to furnish informed consent. With or without their consent, this project violates the fundamental rights of the students.

The officials have indicated that the photographs of the students will not be stored in the system and hence there would be no threat of a violation of privacy. The facial recognition technology works on “training data” where a few sample photographs of the targeted students are saved in the system. When a new photograph is shown to the system, the AI can match with the “training data” and only then, the attendance will be recorded automatically.
It will be practically impossible to make this technology work without saving the photographs of the children in the system.

Facial recognition gets better with the supply of more photographs of students from different angles. The machine learns and gets better over time with the availability of more photographs. The authorities have said that a tender will be invited for this purpose. This means that the application will be developed by a private firm and we are not sure how safely the children’s photographic and biometric data will be stored by a privately owned entity.

The officials have also said that the students’ attendance data will be linked to the Students Achievement Tracking System (SATS). The SATS database contains the students’ phone numbers, email addresses, details of their educational institutions, dates of birth and addresses. Linking personal data with photos of the students leads to “profiling” of these students and this makes the database a risky proposition, if it is susceptible to breaches and leaks. The life of these school and college students will be put under risk.

When the Aadhaar project was announced, it was touted as the solution for addressing inefficiency in social welfare schemes and curbing corruption. In the last 15 years, we have seen several instances of Aadhar data leak. This has helped fraudsters to carry out financial and identity frauds against common citizens. Such frauds have not stopped and the government is yet to develop a viable solution for the problem.

Core issues remain

The officials have said that “the exercise is aimed at getting accurate attendance of students in schools and to identify those who are irregular to school.” For more than five decades, student attendance has been recorded on attendance registers without too many hassles. The existing system allows easy identification of students who are irregular at school. When it is working fine and considering that teachers have not flagged major issues with the system either, what is the need to introduce a new technology? Instead, the government can spend the time and resources to fix the bigger problems faced by the teachers. For a start, it can initiate processes to recruit more teachers.

The government already has the data regarding the students who are irregular at schools and colleges. If anything needs to be addressed, it is the reasons that contribute to the poor attendance of these students. The government needs to recruit more teachers to address concerns of the irregular students,
appoint qualified student counsellors and make work easier for the teachers. One good teacher can make a hundred students attend the school regularly. But a hundred technologies without a good teacher cannot make even one demotivated student attend classes. The onus is on the government to prioritise budgetary allocations in line with the urgency of issues.

(Gagan is an associate professor of law; Surya is an assistant professor of law)