Whilst civil rights activists have long called for an outright ban, certain EU lawmakers may see the AI Act as an opportunity to claim that they are doing the (human) right(s) thing — and actually doing the opposite, Ella Jakubowska writes.
Biometric data have been used in recent years to surveil and monitor people, from trying to suppress and scare pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and Russia to persecuting Black communities in the US.
Even seemingly mundane uses, like in national identity documents, have in fact turned out to be great enablers for systems which scan people’s faces and bodies without due cause — a move that amounts to biometric mass surveillance.
Whether in live mode or used retrospectively, notoriously unreliable and discriminatory public facial recognition infringes massively on our human rights and essential dignity.
According to media reports from Brussels, despite previous commitments to outlaw biometric mass surveillance practices, the European Parliament is now considering “narrow” exceptions to a ban on the live recognition of faces and other human features.
This is not hypothetical: using the purportedly “narrow” exceptions written into the draft AI Act by the EU’s executive arm, the government of Serbia has twice tried to legalise the roll-out of thousands of Huawei facial recognition-equipped cameras.
And the mass surveillance infrastructure — vast networks of public cameras and sensors propped up by powerful processors — will be ready and waiting for us at the press of a button.
The original article contains 1,036 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Biometric data have been used in recent years to surveil and monitor people, from trying to suppress and scare pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and Russia to persecuting Black communities in the US.
Even seemingly mundane uses, like in national identity documents, have in fact turned out to be great enablers for systems which scan people’s faces and bodies without due cause — a move that amounts to biometric mass surveillance.
Whether in live mode or used retrospectively, notoriously unreliable and discriminatory public facial recognition infringes massively on our human rights and essential dignity.
According to media reports from Brussels, despite previous commitments to outlaw biometric mass surveillance practices, the European Parliament is now considering “narrow” exceptions to a ban on the live recognition of faces and other human features.
This is not hypothetical: using the purportedly “narrow” exceptions written into the draft AI Act by the EU’s executive arm, the government of Serbia has twice tried to legalise the roll-out of thousands of Huawei facial recognition-equipped cameras.
And the mass surveillance infrastructure — vast networks of public cameras and sensors propped up by powerful processors — will be ready and waiting for us at the press of a button.
The original article contains 1,036 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!