Hotels in New Delhi’s Aerocity hospitality district are installing facial recognition technology, according to an article by Varuni Khosla in The Economic Times. It’s part of an effort to comply with security requirements set in place by Delhi Police.
The biometric security boom around the world has mostly been led by government adoption of the technology for its own purposes, and private R&D in the area of commercial applications, but rarely do we see a situation where the technology is mandated upon the private sector by government. And according to the article, many of the hoteliers concerned are not pleased about it, grumbling about the high costs of securing the technology.
Of course, there are those who see opportunities in the security requirement. Rahul Pandit, president of Lemon Tree Hotels, commented in the article that hotel “guests will be happy with this as they will be entering a more secure place.” And while another executive from Interglobe Hotels, Shwetank Singh, complained bitterly about the mandate, he did concede, “The only positive spin to it is that it will help recognize frequent guests coming into hotels.”
India’s government is in many ways a worldwide leader in pioneering the deployment of biometric technology, given that its government has begun to set up a nationwide biometric registry of citizens that will facilitate the administration of government services. And it’s certainly not the only country to look at large-scale deployment of the technology for national security and border control purposes. In the case of Aerocity – a hotel district very close to airports – it’s just another security cost for hoteliers to weigh against the benefits of their location.
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November 21, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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