Singapore first-ever started the national system of face recognition for the identity certificate

At the end of September, 2020 it became known that Singapore will become the first country in the world which will use the system of face recognition for the identity certificate at the national level. Biometric check will allow residents of the city-state to get quickly access to state services and bank accounts.

The sensing technology of persons for confirmation of the personality to Singapore was provided by the British company iProov. Its founder and the chief executive Andrew Bud noted that the main task of developers of the similar systems consists in exact algorithms of recognition. A system should define for certain that during the procedure of authentication before a lens there is a living person, but not his photo or the video with Deepfake-processing.

Singapore first-ever started the national system of face recognition for the identity certificate from iProov

The new technique was checked at the level of bank and now is implemented through the whole country for what it is integrated with the scheme of digital identification of the country SingPass. It should be noted that in the territory of Singapore face recognition is already used in departments of tax administration for submission of reportings and DBS bank for opening of the account. In the future this technology probably will also be applied to the identity certificate in safe areas of the airports and at different examinations.

Actually we do not limit use of our technology of the identity certificate if the intended application conforms to our requirements and laws of Singapore, - the senior director on national digital identification of GovTech Singapore Kwok Kvek Xing explained. - The main thing that an inspection of the personality was carried out from a full consent of the citizen.

Available consent the difference between the normal system of face recognition which is used in surveillance cameras, and the system of identification consists. Andrew Bud considers that this requirement is enough for confidential data protection though many do not agree with its arguments.^[1]

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