Serbia grows its facial recognition arsenal amid legality concerns

Serbia dropped reference to biometric technologies from its draft Law on Police, but its Interior Ministry has anyway installed formidable facial recognition software already used by Russia and Iran to track down dissenters

Serbia’s Interior Ministry has added Japanese-developed biometric software NeoFace Watch to its arsenal of facial recognition technology, according to a ministry source who confirmed earlier indications that authorities are also using Russian FindFace.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said NeoFace Watch, developed by pioneering Japanese biometrics firm NEC, and Russian NtechLab’s FindFace have both been bought and installed.

Purchase of an “NEC facial recognition system” was mentioned in the ministry’s public procurement plan in 2019 but the official tender was never published.

The same year, technology non-profit Qurium detected a FindFace server in Serbia hosted by mCloud, which also hosted the NoviSpy spyware that reports say has been used by Serbia’s BIA intelligence agency to target journalists and activists.

The following year, NtechLab co-founder Alexander Kabakov told Forbes that, beyond Moscow, the company has customers in Argentina, Brazil and Serbia.

The Ministry source confirmed that both FindFace and NeoFace Watch are up and running. According to the US Treasury Department, FindFace has been used in Russia to monitor independent journalists, political activists and individuals seeking to avoid mobilisation for the war against Ukraine. Iran also uses the software, according to a recent investigation by the Forbidden Stories newsroom.

Use of the software comes despite the fact that a new draft Law on Police makes no mention of biometric technologies. References in previous drafts were dropped amid public outcry about the threat of surveillance and potential privacy infringements. Neither the Ministry nor the software developers in Russia or Japan responded to requests for comment.

BIRN has previously reported on the Serbian Interior Ministry’s purchase of Swedish forensic software Griffeye, which offers facial recognition, internet face-search and metadata analysis functions. Serbia has also partnered with China’s Huawei to install thousands of high-definition street cameras equipped with facial recognition and vehicle licence plate tracking software. And cities across the country have procured DSS Pro platforms with facial recognition capability.

According to Japanese NEC, NeoFace Watch boasts the ability to carry out “more than three million searches per second” and recognise multiple faces simultaneously.

The facial recognition algorithms developed by NEC have also been licensed and acquired by a number of companies, one of which provides services to US immigration authorities, tech magazine Wired reported in January 2026.

FindFace takes a fraction of a second to compare faces against a database and issues notifications or alerts in real time.

It enables searches for video recordings based on facial characteristics and other specified parameters and can also generate analytical reports on individuals and their behaviour. According to its developers, FindFace can operate across hundreds of thousands of cameras simultaneously.

FindFace’s developer uses the Russian data storage provider Tarantool, which maintains a database of one billion facial records and can perform 13.4 million comparisons per second.

The software also includes features it refers to as “clustering” and “interaction tracking”. The first enables the grouping and filtering of video footage according to specified parameters across multiple levels, for example searching for individuals of a certain age, gender or emotional state, searching footage from specific cameras only, and similar functions.

The “clustering” function unlocks the “interaction tracking” feature, which enables monitoring of the social circle of a person of interest or a group of individuals.