In a move that human rights advocates warn carries potential risks for civil rights, Russia has begun expanding its facial-recognition payment system for subways to six cities outside of Moscow.
Kazan, seat of the Volga River region of Tatarstan, and one subway station in Nizhny Novgorod, another major Volga city, started using the system, called Face Pay, in August, according to Russian media and government reports.
The head of the Biometric Technologies Center (TsBT), the state-run company overseeing the biometric-payments project, claims that all of Russia's subway systems will use the technology by 2025.
"For each participant, the process will be absolutely seamless," Tatar-Inform.ru quoted TsBT General Director Vladislav Povolotsky as saying for Face Pay's Kazan launch. Riders "can move between the cities of our big country using this service."
Citing TsBT documents, the business daily Kommersant reported in January that Yekaterinburg and Samara would also install Face Pay in 2024, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk are to roll out the system by the end of 2025.
Russian officials claim Face Pay offers unrivalled security and convenience since it relies only on a passenger's face to work. But for critics, that's just the problem.
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Face Pay: Moscow Metro's Facial-Recognition Payment System Raises Surveillance Concerns
In Moscow, which launched Russia's first Face Pay system in 2021, CCTV street cameras have been used to detain both alleged participants in anti-government protests and the journalists covering the events.
Citing such detentions and arrests, attorney Andrei Fedorkov, who works with the banned Russian human rights organization Memorial on support for political prisoners, fears that practice could extend to Russia's biometric subway-payment system. He called the risks "significant."
"This system is already active and functioning. It's not as massive and all-encompassing as in China, but the trend is totally obvious," Fedorkov said. "Therefore, yes, this system will become yet another powerful instrument in today's Russia for the surveillance and control of citizens."
'Increased Risks For Human Rights'
Kazan subway users told local news outlet Vechernyaya Kazan that "compliments" appear on screen when the Face Pay device scans their faces and "takes note of (their) styling, taste in clothing, smile, and other features."
As of September 15, they will receive a 15-ruble ($0.16) "cashback" for each Face Pay ride, according to Kazan subway officials.
How many passengers in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod have opted to use Face Pay is not clear.
Visitors are seen at a screen displaying facial recognition technology at the Digital China Exhibition in Fuzhou, Fujian province, China. (file photo)
Aside from Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Japan also use facial recognition for subway payments.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stressed to RFE/RL's Idel.Realities in 2021 that "requirements and safeguards" need to be in place for the use of facial-recognition technology.
Citing a lack of information, OHCHR spokeswoman Liz Throssell declined to comment about the Kazan subway's use of Face Pay, but said that in general terms, "biometric systems, such as payment systems, are high-risk technology that inherently carry increased risks for human rights, including the rights to privacy and to freedom of expression."
Even when the use of biometrics is voluntary, she said in an e-mail, the "sensitivity of biometric data requires particularly strong legal and technical protections."
"The purpose of collecting, storing and using the biometric data, the duration of storage, and who has access to the data must be strictly limited," Throssell said.
Darya Kozlova, an activist protesting against facial recognition, has her face painted with geometrical shapes and lines said to confuse cameras, in Moscow in February 2020
Russia's 2022 law on using biometric data to identify individuals mandates that the government and central bank must automatically destroy biometric data after 10 days unless the person to whom it belongs has complained about the "unlawful processing" of that data or a glitch in using it for authentication. It also bans the transfer of that data to third parties.
Yet the law states that its provisions do not apply to "investigative, counterintelligence and intelligence" work or to "national defense, ensuring state security and law enforcement," and "foreign policy implementation," among other areas.
Online maps indicate that TsBT, a company founded in 2022 by digital services giant Rostelekom, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media, and the central bank, is located in a Moscow building that also houses Rosoboroneksport, the agency that handles Russia's military exports, and the Defense Ministry's Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation.
'Afraid Of Breathing'
TsBT oversees the United Biometric System, which collects biometric information for both subway and private-sector payments.
In a June 27 interview with the website for the digital-technologies conference TsIPR, Povolotsky claimed that the database keeps individuals' "biometric samples" separate from their "personal data." He said the database does not contain "names and last names, individual taxpayer numbers, addresses, and other personal information."
Only the database's "biometric vectors" -- coordinates that mark the distance between key features of the face -- can be accessed from the outside, he added.
Povolotsky does not appear to have publicly addressed concerns about the technology's civil rights risks.
Use of the biometric system is not mandatory for subway riders. Passengers who want to pay via facial recognition must upload a selfie to the mobile application for Russia's government services portal and then connect their account to another app, SBPay, which handles biometric payments, according to a TsBT guide.
Russian anti-surveillance activists ride in a police van after being detained at a Moscow protest. (file photo)
Addressing Russia's overall biometric plans, Povolotsky asserted in June that Russians "will always have a choice -- to receive services the old way or to use biometrics."
That choice is why security expert Pavel Luzin, who formerly advised the late Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, says the real concern about Face Pay may be how people respond to it.
Such payment systems can control people's behavior just through the fear that they are being surveilled -- whether or not they actually are, he says.
"People see the cameras. They're told something about artificial intelligence and, so, they're already afraid of breathing the wrong way and censor themselves," said Luzin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a U.S.-based think-tank.
He called Face Pay investments -- estimated by Kommersant to total 260 million rubles ($2.9 million) for installations alone -- "pointless shams" that don't give "any practical results."
Nonetheless, for those Russians who opt to travel with Face Pay, Fedorkov maintains that risks exist.
Russian security forces, he predicted, "will not, if they have the chance, give up a facial-recognition video-surveillance system, since such technologies allow them to identify in mass protests even those participants who escaped detention."