SurveillanceHigh
South Korean Agencies Reportedly Shared Airport Travelers' Face Images with Companies to Train Immigration Facial Recognition System
- Occurred
- Jun 1, 2019
- Published
- Nov 9, 2021
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Reporting in 2021 alleged that South Korea's Ministry of Justice shared roughly 170 million face images and related biometric data from Korean and foreign airport travelers with the Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and private companies for an AI identification and tracking system used in immigration screening. The data was reportedly used for AI training and algorithm testing without travelers' consent.
Developers
- Surveillance technology developers
- Facial recognition system developers
Deployers
- Government of South Korea
- South Korean Ministry of Justice
- South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT
- National IT Industry Promotion Agency
Harmed parties
- Foreign nationals traveling through South Korean airports
- Korean citizens whose airport facial images were used
- Biometric data subjects
- Privacy
- Airport travelers in South Korea
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Unauthorized facial recognition system using travelers' data without consent constitutes significant privacy and surveillance violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8