The Iranian government is looking to implement new technology that will allow them to identify women who are not abiding by the country’s strict new law that requires women to wear hijabs in public. According to The Guardian, the women who break the law signed by President Ebrahim Raisi will be identified using facial recognition technology.
The new law was signed on August 15, nearly a month after the national ‘Hijab and Chastity Day’ in Iran on July 12. The occasion prompted widespread protests by women throughout the country, and they were seen out in the streets without head coverings, resulting in a number of arrests and detentions.
According to Azadeh Akbari, a researcher at the University of Twente, ‘the Iranian government has long experimented with the idea of using facial recognition to identify people who violate the law. The regime combines violent ‘old-fashioned’ totalitarian control disguised in new technologies’.
Iran currently issues biometric identity cards to its citizens, which store information such as iris scans and fingerprints. The announcement sparked fears among many people in the country that the same technology would now be used to facially identify dissenters as well as spy on the general public.
‘A large portion of the Iranian population is now included in this national biometric data bank, as many public services are becoming dependent on biometric IDs. So the government has access to all of the faces; they know where people come from and can easily find them. A person in a viral video can be identified in seconds,’ Akbari explained.
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