(Photo by Alexander Shcherbak\TASS via Getty Images)

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced last week that the Russian city is rolling out live facial recognition, which can be linked with a mobile app, to help alert police to potential suspects.

In a report published by the Russian business daily Vedomosti, the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT) will be using technology acquired from Ntechlab. Ntechlab is best known for developing the FindFace app, which could track every user on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook.

While the public version of FindFace was shut down, with the company pivoting toward business and government work, it is the FindFace Security app that will send police officers an alert if a criminal is spotted by the facial-recognition system.

Ntechlab has developed a new system for Moscow's CCTVs that is separate from FindFace, according to a spokesperson. The system is apparently adapted for simultaneous use on "hundreds of thousands of cameras," with the city also able to "use the algorithms of different suppliers."

In 2019, it was reported that Ntechlab was also developing facial-recognition glasses for law enforcement, which would be linked to 1,500 of Moscow's 167,000 CCTV cameras. At the time, Andrey Belozerov, Moscow's Strategy and Innovations Advisor, said the technology would be popular with the city's residents because it could be used for insurance purposes or locating a lost child.

While the Russian government has touted a strong government influence on the internet as a net benefit, epitomized by plans to cut itself off from the global web, there are obvious issues. It does not take a conspiracy theorist to imagine what the Russian government, which has a controversial history with CCTV footage, would do with facial-recognition software. The FindFace app has also been used to shame sex workers in Russia with people using the app to find the workers and then sending messages to their friends and families, outing their profession.

Moscow is not the only city to roll out live facial recognition. In the UK, the London Metropolitan Police introduced the technology in certain parts of the city in order to find "wanted individuals." The move has been repeatedly criticized, especially after the police worked with a private developer to set up facial-recognition technology seemingly without the knowledge of those living and working there, and denying their involvement when questioned about it.

A number of cities in the United States have already banned facial recognition, but that hasn't stopped it being used by law enforcement. A recent report on facial-recognition company Clearview AI, which scrapes Facebook, Twitter, Venmo, and other social media sites for identifying information, showed how police forces have been paying thousands of dollars to use the technology seemingly without the knowledge of people in Clearview's database.

Google even went so far as to endorse the European Union's temporary ban on facial recognition, with CEO Sundar Pichai saying he thinks "it's important governments and regulations tackle it sooner, rather than later, and give a framework for it." Such concerns have been raised because of the technology's lack of accuracy and the risk of racial profiling.

Nevertheless, in a statement to The Verge, Ntechlab's CEO Alex Minin said that "when carefully orchestrated, the system is not only harmless to regular people, it helps a lot in catching terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, and pickpockets by aiding police to identify them in seconds and locate and capture them in hours instead of days and weeks. The software itself doesn't break any laws or do any harm."

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