Moscow City Hall will hand over photos of users to the police mos.ru

On October 13, 2021, it became known about the contract that the Moscow government concluded to finalize the portal mos.ru. The essence of the project is that all uploaded photos of public service users are transmitted to the facial recognition system, which the police have access to.

The newspaper Kommersant"" wrote about this tender with reference to public procurement materials. Subordinate to the Department of Information Technology () DIT Moscow GKU "" Information City concluded a Bright soft contract with the Perm company "" for 236 million. rubles

According to the terms of reference, the contractor will have to develop and implement on mos.ru the procedure for saving "the reference photo from the user profile to the additional gallery of the subsystem for automatic recording of video information indexing scenarios (PARSIV) of the Unified Data Storage Center (ECXD) of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow." Also, the contractor of the contract should ensure the collection of media data and telemetry of users' smartphones.

Moscow City Hall will hand over photos of users to the police mos.ru

DIT did not answer the publication's question about why to transfer user photos to the ECXD PARSIV and from which specific services they will be uploaded. The department only noted that "the opportunity to independently upload a photo is provided to users of the portal mos.ru when issuing an application for public services."

The Moscow government's plans to finalize the portal mos.ru so that all photos of users who applied for public services are transferred to the security forces in the facial recognition system, risk an increased risk of leaking this data and the unlawful use of third parties, as well as any centralization of information, said the head of Roskomsvoboda Artyom Kozlyuk.

When some state departments collect data, it is better that they are stored separately, rather than flocking to some one base, since there are increased risks of information leakage, as well as the risks of illegal access of third parties to this information without public control. Any centralization of sensitive data is evil, it is better that they are stored in different systems under different controls. Then it is less likely that they will be abused, "he said.[1]

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