Panoptic
Added to the Museum of Data by Nikhil Dharmaraj on Monday, February 23, 2026. Museum of Data Collection ID: 1158.
Public description: Panoptic is a Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) tracker run by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) in India. Panoptic essentially serves as a public interest community project to document the rise of FRT systems across states in India to document the concerning rise in its usage by the right-wing Hindu nationalist state. There are several concerns with accuracy, privacy, and surveillance in the deployment of FRT, and transparency is minimal: FRT thus collects and archives machine data about the existence and use of these systems to make their presence known, visible, trackable, and thus available to public scrutiny and critique. Hyderabad, India is the first place in India where FRT was legally challenged by an anti-surveillance activist who brough the concern to the Telangana High Court.
Materials used: This object is made of clicks and digital graphics: it is ultimately a map of pixels that is powered by a click-based algorithm that highlights the differing numbers and scopes of FRT systems. The screenshot uploaded is a representation of the map, which itself is meant to represent the country of India in digital pixelated form.
Credit: This is a public interest community-based project, so it is collectively owned. However, as noted, it was created by members at IFF. In particular, this object is built and maintained by Shivam Mishra, and it is designed by Shobhit Katikia.
Copyright: A public interest community project | panoptic@internetfreedom.in All contents licensed under CC-BY unless stated otherwise.
Language: English
Size: The map is in a grid within the panoptic website, that is 510 px in width and 670 px in height on my standard laptop screen.
Creation date: 2021/11/11 00:00:00
Alternate titles: Panoptic Tracker
External link: https://panoptic.in/
Tags: 7, 14, 17