South Korea Is Giving Millions of Photos To Facial Recognition Researchers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The South Korean Ministry of Justice has provided more than 100 million photos of foreign nationals who travelled through the country's airports to facial recognition companies without their consent, according to attorneys with the non-governmental organization Lawyers for a Democratic Society. While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a "human rights disaster" that is relatively unprecedented. "It's unheard-of for state organizations -- whose duty 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," six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The revelation, first reported in the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, came to light after National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested and received documents from the Ministry of Justice related to a April 2019 project titled Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction Project. The documents show private companies secretly used biometric data to research and develop an advanced immigration screening system that would utilize artificial intelligence to automatically identify airport users' identities through CCTV surveillance cameras and detect dangerous situations in real time. Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

"We, the NGOs, urge the government to immediately stop the establishment of a biometric monitoring system that is not only illegal but also significantly violates international human rights norms," wrote Advocates for Public Interest Law, MINBYUN -- Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the Institute for Digital Rights, the Joint Committee with Migrants in Korea, and the Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet, in a press release that was translated and provided to Motherboard. Attorneys claim the project directly violates South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act, a law that strictly limits the processing of personal information in the country. Still, the Ministry has yet to announce plans to halt the program, which was scheduled to be completed in 2022.

Let's play

[ruddk]

find the North Korean.

Re:

[Finallyjoined!!!]

"South Korea is giving". Incorrect, anyone that uses Facebook etc. etc. is "giving". Just needs harvesting.

Re:

[Jesus H Rolle]

"South Korea is giving". Incorrect, anyone that uses Facebook etc. etc. is "giving". Just needs harvesting.

South Korea is indeed "giving" those photos. I didn't have a choice; they took my photo when I changed planes there, even though I never went through immigration, and they didn't tell me they were giving it to a private company. Had they informed me, I might have used a different airport. Facebook is the wrong comparison.

Re:

[retchdog]

lol cry more.

south korea is a nation-state; they don't have to tell you anything. you're not some globalist shill are you?

Is consent necessary?

[mveloso]

I doubt consent is actually necessary in this case.

Is that data tied to name/passport information? If so that would be an awesome data set.

Re:Is consent necessary?

[AmiMoJo]

I visited Korea for about 3 hours a few years ago. I didn't consent to this. Nobody asked, there was no contact or warning. Photos were mandatory to enter the country.

Implied consent

[mveloso]

When you enter a country you are consenting to the application of local laws, among other things. Explicit consent is not required.

It's like a clickthru license.

The question is really "who owns that data and what can they do with it?" And I suspect the answer is "they can do anything they want with it."

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

A foreign national that doesn't go through customs&immigration isn't technically in South Korea.

Naive question - is this good or bad for FPs?

[Somervillain]

If I were Korean, would I want this? Is my bigger fear they will ID me or they will misidentify me? Are false positives more common in Korea than other parts of the world?

I wish I knew a good way of saying this, but a lot of people from Korea look pretty similar, especially if the cameras are in environments with sub-optimal lighting or angles, particularly now that we have to be masked in places like airports. If I looked extremely similar to many of my neighbors, I'd be a bit nervous about getting m

Re:

[dstwins]

Flag by mistake or flag with intent to intimidate/restrict... it amounts to the same thing... These tools have a way of bypassing the usual checks and balances that comes from more "traditional" investigations and as people begin to place more faith in these, it just becomes another oppression tool.

THAT is why privacy advocates are upset about this.. because we have TONS of historical evidence which shows how people WILL be harmed by this (humans are the least trustworthy creatures to walk the planet).. oh,

Good luck to the algorithm...

[dargaud]

When you consider this [gawker.com].

but they all look the same

[jinchoung]

budum-cha.

Two claims that can't both be true

[sabbede]

"While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world"

"also significantly violates international human rights norms"

If it has become common for governments, then is that not the definition of an "international norm"? That an NGO and its affiliates agree on something does not make it an international norm, they aren't nations.