The rules will cover government agencies and private contractors, and require them to register their algorithms, publish error rates and provide a way for people to challenge matches. The ministry said 27 of 38 recommendations from a digital-rights review had been accepted — a 71% adoption rate — with the first requirements due to take effect on 1 December.
Organisers estimated 6,400 people joined the protest at Church Square, a historic plaza in central Pretoria; the city’s transport counters recorded 5,900 arrivals. Demonstrators carried blank-faced masks and signs without slogans, calling for the government to stop expanding automated face checks before setting limits on their use.
The new rules for face scans
The announcement does not switch off cameras already operating in public spaces. Instead, officials will suspend new contracts and expansions until systems are registered and their owners disclose what data they collect, how long they keep it and which public bodies can search it. The pause applies to all nine provinces, the ministry said.
Agencies must also publish independent tests of how often their systems wrongly identify people, report searches each quarter and offer a human review when someone disputes a match. The rules bar searches for political or commercial profiling. Officials have 60 days to name an enforcement office and set penalties, details still missing from Tuesday’s announcement.
People should not have to guess whether a camera is watching them or what happens to the scan.
Joany Frami, protest organiser
Frami said the rally began at 08:00 and drew bus drivers, software workers and privacy campaigners. She called the registration plan a first step, but said organisers would keep pressing for a ban on face scans in transport hubs. “A list of systems is useful only if somebody can make them stop,” she said.
The largest existing network belongs to a fictional consortium, Cape Meridian Analytics, which provides camera software to four city authorities. The company said it would meet the registration deadline and would not start planned installations during the freeze. Its chief executive, Hester Runolfsdottir, said the rules could “set one clear standard instead of nine different ones”.
A costly pause for cities
The government review estimated that face-scanning systems process 2.4 million images a month across transport stations, municipal buildings and selected road junctions. It put the value of proposed contracts awaiting approval at R3.6 billion (about €181 million), though the ministry has not said how much of that spending will be delayed.
Rimtis Valerija-Mintara, a technology-law lecturer at the fictional Cape Peninsula Policy Institute, said the test would be whether the register gave the public enough detail to judge a system. “Publishing a vendor’s name is not the same as explaining what its software does,” she said. She also warned that quarterly reports could miss short-term deployments unless the rules cover temporary trials.
Deputy communications minister David S. Kolarič said the ministry would publish the accepted recommendations and a timetable for the remaining 11 by Friday. The review’s proposals on court approval for searches and compensation after wrongful matches were not accepted outright; officials say they need further legal work, leaving campaigners with a deadline — and a new argument — to take back to the square.
