AI incident ·
SASSA Facial-Verification Failures Reportedly Contributed to Social Grant Access Disruptions in South Africa
In brief
An AI system built by Facial Recognition System Developers and Biometric Identity Verification Technology Developers and deployed by South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) and Facial Recognition System Deployers allegedly harmed General Public, General Public Of South Africa and 6 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 3 reports
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.
Laws that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (3)
Titles link to the original publisher; report 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)
- Risk domain
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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- Intent
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- Timing
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- Harm level
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- Countries
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Source record: incident #1606 on the AI Incident Database · all 3 reports