Moscow Metro Face Pay

Incidents and issues 🔥

• Upon launch, activists expressed concerns about possible privacy abuse and the system's potential for surveillance and social control. Face Pay is 'a good pretext to put cameras at the turnstiles' an activist group from Moscow told the New York Times. 

• In March 2022, the BBC reported that protestors against Russia's invasion of Ukraine were likely being identified by the Moscow Metro's facial recognition system.

• Shortly afterwards, Moscow’s municipal IT department announced it is looking to build a centralised data storage facility for facial recognition and other data collected from the city and across Russia.

• In 2019, Moscow City Police were found to have been selling citizens' facial data and access to live streams of the city's CCTV facial recognition surveillance network, according to an investigation by MBKh Media.