KOREAN FACIAL recognition project FACES opposition
It was discovered last month that a South Korean government project has been supplying millions of facial images taken at Incheon international airport to private industry without the consent of those photographed. several civic groups called this a “shocking human rights disaster” in a 9 Nov press conference, and formally requested that the project be cancelled. In response, the government has only promised that “the project would be conducted at a minimum level to make sure personal information is not abused”. These groups are now planning a claim to challenge the project.
Facial information and other biometric data aren’t easily altered and are special to the individuals concerned. If this data were to be leaked, it would constitute a devastating infringement upon their privacy. It’s unheard of for state organizations — whose task it is to manage and control facial recognition technology — to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology.
The program itself wasn’t secret, and had been publicly announced back in 2019. but the project’s scope and implementation weren’t made clear until a lawmaker recently requested papers on the project from the responsible government agencies. The system, called the man-made intelligence and tracking System construction Project, was a pilot program set to run until 2022. Its goals were to simplify the safety and immigration screening of passengers, improve airport security, and to promote the local AI industry in South Korea. If the project proves successful, the plan is to expand it to other airports and ports in the country.
Current systems at the airport do one-to-one facial recognition. For example, they try to figure out whether the face of the person presenting a passport matches the photo in the passport. The goal of this new project was to develop one-to-many matching algorithms, which can match one face against the plethora of faces in an airport, track the movement of a face within the airport, and flag “suspicious” activities which could be a safety concern.
The groups protesting the project note that the collection and sharing of these images without the travelers’ consent is prohibited by the personal information protection Act, the South Korean law which governs such things. Under this act, a project like this would generally require consent of the participants. but the government’s interpretation counts on an exception in the act, specifically, post 15 section 3, which states:
A personal information controller may use personal information without the consent of a data subject within the scope reasonably related to the initial purpose of the collection
Basically they are saying that considering that the images were collected at the safety and immigration checkpoints, and that the project will be using them to improve the safety and immigration checkpoints, no consent is required.
Foreigners: 120 million individuals, face image, nationality, gender, age
Korean citizens: 57.6 million individuals, face image, nationality, gender, age
Other: unknown number of individuals, images and videos of atypical behavior and travelers in motion
The breakdown of the numbers above reveals that 57 million Korean citizens are in the data set, a bit unusual to lots of considering that the collection of biometric data on Korean citizens at immigration is prohibited by law. The project circumvented this by only collecting data from citizens who participate in the automated smart entry service, a voluntary program which uses fingerprints and facial recognition. It’s interesting to note that the number of passengers using Incheon airport since may 2019 (the program was announced 30 Apr 2019) is only 62 million, so the average passenger appears around three times in the data set.
Are there any similar programs in your region? how do they manage the issue of consent, if at all? let us know in the comments below.
[Banner image: “Customer uses facial recognition as identification at TSA safety checkpoint” by DeltaNewsHub, CC BY 2.0 — Yes, it’s from another country with similar problems, but much less public outcry. go over in the comments!]