Incident #1606
SASSA Facial-Verification Failures Reportedly Contributed to Social Grant Access Disruptions in South Africa
Description
South African social grant beneficiaries reportedly encountered repeated failures in SASSA's eLife facial-verification portal. Later parliamentary reporting said unsuccessful facial recognition was among the causes of non-verification and confirmed 67,868 grant suspensions in one quarter, but did not specify how many suspensions resulted from facial-verification failures. Affected users were redirected to in-person fingerprint checks.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- south-african-social-security-agency-(sassa)
- facial-recognition-system-deployers
Alleged Developers
- facial-recognition-system-developers
- biometric-identity-verification-technology-developers
Harmed Parties
- general-public
- general-public-of-south-africa
- south-african-social-grant-beneficiaries
- social-assistance-recipients
- pensioners
- elderly-individuals
- privacy
- biometric-data-subjects