VIJAYAWADA: Two days after implementing Face Recognition Mobile Application for registering attendance of government school teachers, the State government is set to introduce the same method to mark students’ attendance in junior and degree colleges across Andhra Pradesh.
At a recent meeting, Education Minister Botcha Satyanarayana hinted that they might introduce the system for registering attendance of government employees right from the Chief Secretary to an attendee, once the initiative is successful.
The new method to mark attendance came into force at all government schools in the State on September 1. Of the total of 1,85,090 teachers, 64,402 (40.46 per cent) registered their attendance through the face recognition app on the first day. On day two (September 2), a total of 1,14,653 (69.80 per cent) teachers marked their attendance using the app.
Over the past two days, Higher Education Commissioner Pola Bhaskar has held meetings with stakeholders to discuss the pros and cons of implementing the face recognition app to register the attendance of students in colleges. They also discussed the possibility of linking it with scholarships being provided by the government.
SRR and CVR Degree College in Vijayawada chosen for pilot project
SRR and CVR Government Degree College in Vijayawada were chosen for the pilot project and they started registering students’ attendance through the app on August 30. Sources said after the success of the pilot project, the same would be implemented in 16 autonomous colleges across the State.
Terming the processing time consuming, General Secretary of Government College Teachers’ Association, M Syam Babu said it would take 6 to 10 minutes to register the attendance of 60 students using the app, while it would take only three minutes to do so using the traditional method.
Flagging other concerns, he pointed out that there is no security from third-party intervention.
“The app can read all the contacts, images and other data on the phone. Moreover, such apps would not function well on low-configuration smartphones as they do not have adequate space. Certain interior areas lack proper network, further affecting the functioning of the app,” Syam Babu said.
ABVP leader Gudipati Subbaraju criticised the government’s decision to use the face app for registering students’ attendance and further linking it with scholarships. “Can the government dare to use the face recognition app to register the attendance of students in private colleges and link it with scholarships?” he asked.
Security engineer at Bengaluru-based firm, Trend Micro, Suneel Kumar said, “No mobile application is 100 per cent secure. Though people feel it is easy to SSO (single sign on) using face recognition, it comes with a set of problems. Even minute changes on the face, including pimples or deformations due to accidents, may not be detected by the app. Most of the procedure is dependent on jaw lines. There have been incidents where people with similar jaw lines were able to mark each others’ attendance. Another interesting fact is that a similar app has already been hacked and the process of hacking this app is called ‘Deep Face’.”