Privacy and Security: Ethical Impact Assessment on Deploying Automated Facial Recognition Technology (AFRT) in Government Sectors

This research report details the findings from an analysis, evaluation, deployment of an Automated Facial Recognition Technology (AFRT) government utilize this system to magnify user authentication, authorization, and exclusive identification for access to various state-level services for instance to enhance an application for, and renewal of, state vehicle, boat, and firearms licences. The government put AFRA as a trial model to conduct an assessment to understand the preliminary’s factors of project deployment, CAPEX/ OPEX cost, performance, and benefits to the state departments. During the project trial, the State Police department have manifested their interest in AFRA and that they would like to see a roll-out of AFRA into the streets of all major cities in the state to enhance their monitoring, security capability, and quickly identify criminals and other “persons of interest”. The role of AFRT will be part of the state police organizational routine operational activities. The national and economic day-to-day operations of countries across the globe now rely entirely on cyberspace as virtually all business processes, state government projects are vastly utilizing cloud resources for storage, access, and management operations. Because of any potential identity theft either any organization facing a major security breach of their data which emanate the disclosure of sensitive assets could have profound consequences which affect the organization’s core values and causing financial impoverishment, disruption of services, legal and regulatory compliance issues, affects public reputation and workforce reduction. In this report, we consider the project potentials, all the possible risks, benefits, and ethical implications of the proposed deployment of the AFRA system in the state government services and vastly covered attack formulation phases, biometric use cases on the public and private sector, privacy policy, frameworks, data protection laws, and violations, and privacy impact assessment