Hyderabad 'on the brink of becoming a total surveillance city': Amnesty Int.

Hyderabad is on the verge of becoming a surveillance city, international NGO Amnesty has noted in a report.

The organisation said that Hyderabad is the most surveilled city in the world and a Command-and-Control Centre meant for connecting Telangana’s facial recognition-capable CCTV infrastructure was being constructed there.

As part of its ‘Ban the Scan’ campaign against FRT, Amnesty noted that the extensive surveillance is putting human rights at risk. “Hyderabad is on the brink of becoming a total surveillance city. It is almost impossible to walk down the street without risking exposure to facial recognition,” said Matt Mahmoudi, Amnesty International’s AI and Big Data researcher.

According to Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, many incidents from November 2019 to July 2021 posted on social media showed Hyderabad Police asking civilians to remove their masks, photographing them in the streets, without any reason. The report also said that there were cases when police randomly demanded both facial and fingerprint reads from civilians.

Conducting research in two neighbourhoods of Hyderabad along with the Internet Freedom Foundation and Article 19, Amnesty International found on mapping visible outdoor CCTV infrastructure that the Kala Pathar and Kishan Bagh localities had CCTV coverage in about 53.7% and 62.7% of their entire area.