Service: Identity Check of Migrants - Analysis of content and language of phones

Responsible organisation: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, BAMF) (Central-Government)

The Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, BAMF) has been using automated text and speech recognition systems to identify refugees since 2017. Agency employees can ask asylum seekers to give them access to their cell phone, tablet, or laptop to verify if they are telling the truth about where they come from. The agency has the ability to obtain all the data contained on the devices and run software on it. The software presents the employee with a limited overview of the content, which also includes language analysis of the text retrieved. According to the BAMF, both the software and the hardware was provided by the firm Atos SE, however, VICE Magazine found evidence, that the mobile forensic technology firm MSAB was also involved. Another tool deployed by the BAMF aims to identify disguised dialects in speech. When an asylum seeker does not have a valid proof of ID, a two-minute voice recording of the person describing a picture in their mother tongue is analyzed by software, which then calculates a percentage of how close the speech comes to a certain dialect.

Additional information

Source Open Innovation Regione Lombardia
Web site  
Start/end date 2017 -
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