AI incident #1606 ·
SASSA Facial-Verification Failures Reportedly Contributed to Social Grant Access Disruptions in South Africa
What happened
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.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (3)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged developer
- Facial Recognition System Developers, Biometric Identity Verification Technology Developers
- Alleged harmed party
- General Public, General Public Of South Africa, South African Social Grant Beneficiaries, Social Assistance Recipients, Pensioners, Elderly Individuals, Privacy, Biometric Data Subjects
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
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