The European Parliament today called for a ban on police use of facial recognition technology in public places, and on predictive policing, a controversial practice that involves using AI tools in hopes of profiling potential criminals before a crime is even committed.
In a resolution adopted overwhelmingly in favor, MEPs also asked for a ban on private facial recognition databases, like the ones used by the controversial company Clearview AI. The Parliament also supports the European Commission's attempt in its AI bill to ban social scoring systems, such as the ones launched by China that rate citizens' trustworthiness based on their behavior.
“This is a huge win for all European citizens,” said Petar Vitanov (S&D), the resolution's author.
The non-biding resolution sends a strong signal on how the Parliament is likely to vote in upcoming negotiations of the AI Act. The European Commission’s proposal of the bill restricts the use of remote biometric identification — including facial recognition technology — in public places unless it is to fight “serious” crime, such as kidnappings and terrorism.
The AI Act’s lead negotiator, Brando Benifei (S&D) and almost all of his co-negotiators from other political groups in the Parliament have called for a blanket ban on facial recognition. This is in stark contrast to policies implemented in some EU member countries, who are keen to use these technologies to bolster their security apparatuses.
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thetomahawk42 on October 6th, 2021 at 11:58 UTC »
It's a bit of a mis-leading headline (unsurprisingly).
Synchrotr0n on October 6th, 2021 at 11:47 UTC »
In Brazil the government just built a huge database for facial recognition by taking driving license pictures and not a single person whose job is to protect the population made any opposition to it.
Now people are getting arrested for simply looking like the suspect of a crime, just because a computer algorithm said that two faces matched and both police officers and judges are too stupid to know that a face match can at best be used as circumstantial evidence, to get a clue about the possible identity of the criminal, and not as justification for an arrest warrant to be issued. And that's just a mild consequence of the misuse of facial recognition, but things can get much worse if the technology is used maliciously.
slazer2k on October 6th, 2021 at 11:18 UTC »
That would be really great otherwise you will have it like Minority report walk down in the City and each screen addresses you with Name and says hi John Doe we know you like XYZ go to Bla bla and buy ... and that's just the harmless stuff.