Identity-management and citizen scoring in Ghana, Rwanda, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and China
A review of identity-management practices in five African countries shows that much of the continent is well on its way towards comprehensive biometric registration. It could enable comprehensive citizen scoring or automated surveillance in the near future.
The report Identity-management and citizen scoring in Ghana, Rwanda, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and China was commissioned to AlgorithmWatch by a public-sector organization, which asked not to be cited, last May. We recently obtained permission to publish it here.
In many African countries, the obligation to issue biometric passports in the early 2000s, which the United States and, later, members of the European Union demanded, opened the door to the biometric registration of whole populations. An industry was set up to provide fingerprints readers, facial recognition technology and a vast array of software to process this newly-acquired data.
by Nicolas Kayser-Bril