The Iranian government is looking to implement a new technology which will allow them to identify the women who are not complying with the country’s tough new law which makes wearing hijabs in public compulsory. The women breaking the law signed by President Ebrahim Raisi will be recognised with the help of face recognition technology, Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, the secretary of Iran’s Headquarters for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, said according to The Guardian.
The new law was signed on August 15, more than a month on July 12 – the national “Hijab and Chastity Day” celebrated in Iran. The occasion saw widespread protests by women in the country and they were out in the streets without any head coverings resulting in a number of arrests and detentions.
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“The Iranian government has long played with the idea of using facial recognition to identify people who violate the law, Azadeh Akbari, a researcher at the University of Twente, told The Guardian. “The regime combines violent ‘old-fashioned’ forms of totalitarian control dressed up in new technologies.”
Iran currently issues biometric identity cards for their citizens which store information like iris scans and fingerprints. The announcement sparked fears among a number of people in the country that the same technology will now be used to facially identify dissenters and also snoop on the general public.
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“A large chunk of the Iranian population is now in this national biometric data bank, as many public services are becoming dependent on biometric IDs.”
“So, the government has access to all the faces; they know where people come from and they can easily find them. A person in a viral video can be identified in seconds,” Akbari explained.
(With inputs from agencies)
