Fast Food And Beverage Retail Chain Chaayos Captures Customers’ Facial Data

Chaayos, a retail chain selling fast food and beverage is in the center of controversy after Nikhil Pahwa, MediaNama founder and journalist, uploaded on YouTube a video showing how the company has implemented at its outlets facial recognition systems. While, according to the company, the new technology allows payments and checkouts to be seamless and faster, privacy advocates are still concerned about the new development.

Many have pointed out on social media that the company hasn’t asked for its customers’ consent before capturing their faces. Moreover, the customers also don’t have an option to not take part in the invasive biometric process. What becomes even more alarming is that in the company’s T&C page, there is a paragraph which says it can’t guarantee that it would keep the customer data private.

The paragraph read:

This means that your private data may be shared with any third-party by the company for any reason anytime without your consent.

However, in its statement to NDTV, the company said that some of those allegations were not true. According to Chaayos, the facial data of the customers is encrypted. Therefore, it is not possible for any party, even Chaayos to access except for when logging-in the customers. The data, as stated by Chaayos, is not shared with any third party and this information is not processed for any other purpose. Customers can also choose to not take part in this facial recognition process.

It remains unclear as to when the company started deploying the technology. However, an Inc42 report suggests that the technology might have been deployed at the beginning of November.

In a country where there is no norm for facial recognition as well as no strict privacy regulation, biometric data should be viewed as a ticking time-bomb, just take a look at the Aadhaar database leak.