NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The Moscow Metro plans to roll out facial-recognition technology at every station by the end of 2021 to enable customers to pay fares, officials say. The project, while delayed, would be the largest of its kind globally.
Dubbing the new payments system “Face Pay,” the large metro system, which has more than 200 stations, is no stranger to facial-recognition technology. At around the same time that the Moscow Metro gave update on its biometric fare payments rollout, the agency also said that cameras in its stations have helped bring about the arrest of 900 criminal suspects. And the city this year also plans to expand use of cameras for surveillance in stations and on metro cars to hunt for suspects.
Perhaps to allay privacy fears, the metro Tuesday posted comments from an interview that Andrei Kichigin, head of the Moscow Metro's security service, gave to Russian publication Lenta.ru, in which he said–apparently speaking only of the system to look for people the state deems criminals–that “the face recognition system does not know any surnames, names, or other personal data. Only those persons who are on the wanted list are checked, if the person is in the database of law enforcement agencies. If he is not there, then there is nothing to compare with.”
