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Behind the Scenes of "No Facing Away: Why India's Facial Recognition System is Bad News for Minorities"
My first assignment as a journalist was to report on the life of Africans in Delhi, who at the time had been accused of carrying on a drug and sex racket. A pamphlet distributed in the neighbourhood read: “All landlords are requested not to let their properties to Nigerians or other such disruptive elements.”
The basis of this profiling was deep-seated racism – going back to brown Indians feeling inferior about their complexion due to their history of colonisation by the British. They were now trying to feel superior by believing they were better than black people. Many Indians who internalised the colourism received from their colonisers started passing on the discrimination to anyone darker than so that they could have the solace of not being on the lowermost rung of this conveniently concocted hierarchy.
In the past few years, humans have made huge advancements in technology, while transferring their biases to it. We outsourced our prejudice, and called technology neutral because of its non-human form. The lenses were supposed to be new but those holding the camera – and their vantage point – had not changed much.
Facial recognition technology has since proved this bias transference many times. From wrongful arrests to death threats, the tech has led to the targeting of innocents, especially those with vulnerable social identities. Such concerns have led to resistance against this identification system in many countries. In Europe, Belgium and Luxembourg took an official stand against the technology.
The latest addition to the Unbias the News repository of stories – written by Aishwarya Jagani and illustrated by Victoria Shibaeva – examines the use of facial recognition technology in the context of India, and how it particularly threatens minorities. The errors and inaccuracies of the system do not only lead to unfair persecution. They also end up excluding people from receiving state-sponsored benefits. This happens when these welfare programmes closely tie up their distribution structures with such identification systems.
On the other hand, law enforcement in various parts of the world continues to argue in favour of the tech. But how does one know for sure that after all the drawbacks of this technology, it won’t add to the long trail of “collaterals” historically created by the criminal justice system? This won’t be the first time technology hailed as being revolutionary in the initial days led to unjust convictions and was ultimately deemed fallacious.
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It was already dark when Samrin was left alone in the woods. He had no backpack, sleeping bag, or food. His phone was running out of battery. The next morning, Samrin came online briefly to send Sanooja a final message on WhatsApp: “No water, I think I’ll die. Trangam, I love you.”
From 2013 to the present, Refaat has searched everywhere for their children. For ten years he has been traveling, asking, and searching. He has even appeared on TV hoping one day to be reunited with them. But to this day he still does not know if his children were saved or if they are two of the 268 victims of the October 11, 2013 shipwreck, one of the worst Mediterranean disasters in the last three decades.
“My wish is that even 100 years from now these graves stand as monuments of the EU’s shame. Because it was not the river that killed these people, but the EU border regime.”
No one ever comes to visit, but on days when there are funerals here and flowers are about to be thrown out, I place them on the tombs containing the unknown migrants,” he explains. “In some of the older graves, you have the remains of up to five or six migrants together, each placed in separate sacks within the same niche to save space.”
Latsoudi recalls something a refugee had mentioned to her in 2015: ‘The worst thing that can happen to us is to die somewhere far away and have no one at our funeral’.
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