In a new development that seems to come from a dystopian future, Iran has announced it will use facial recognition technology to identify and prosecute women who defy the country’s strict and draconian hijab laws.
There are suspicions that Iran may already be using facial recognition technology to prosecute women and that Jina Mahsa Amini may have been arrested for Iran’s use of facial recognition. Photo credit: Pexels
Critics of facial recognition technology have rightly pointed out how the technology can be abused in regimes with authoritarian undertones to keep their citizens in check. Iran is fair the latest in a long list of authoritarian countries to do so.
Iranian lawmakers last year suggested that facial recognition should be used to monitor hijab law. The head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology is being used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failures.” Complying with hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by comparing faces to a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
Since September 2022, the nation has had violent protests against hijab legislation, which requires women to cover their faces in public. Iran’s so-called morality police are keen to enforce this rule, and women who break it risk penalties. It all started with a 22-year-old Kurd named Jina Mahsa Amini, who died in the custody of Iran’s Morality Police. She was arrested by the Iranian Morality Police for not wearing the hijab tightly enough.
Facial comparisons in a national identity database could be used to identify women, and fines and arrests could be imposed based on such identification. According to Wired, the fact that so many women are being held in their homes suggests that facial recognition may already be in use by Iranian officials.
Mahsa Alimardani, who studies freedom of expression in Iran at Oxford University, recently heard stories of Iranian women being given mail-order tickets for violating the hijab rule, despite never having dealt with a law enforcement official.
According to Alimardani, the Iranian government has spent years developing a computerized surveillance system. The nation’s national identification database, created in 2015, contains biometric information, including facial scans, and is used to create national ID cards and identify people the government considers to be rebels.
This article was previously published on Source link
