EU privacy watchdogs call for ban on facial recognition in public spaces – Security

Europe’s two privateness watchdogs teamed up to simply call for a ban on the use of facial recognition in community areas, heading versus draft European Union rules which would enable the technological know-how to be applied for community stability reasons.

The European Commission in April proposed rules on artificial intelligence, such as a ban on most surveillance, in a bid to established world wide specifications for a crucial technological know-how dominated by China and the United States.

The proposal does enable superior-threat AI programs to be applied in parts this sort of as migration and legislation enforcement, nevertheless it laid out rigorous safeguards, with the threat of fines of as a lot as six p.c of a company’s world wide turnover for breaches.

The proposal wants to be negotiated with EU nations and the bloc’s lawmakers just before it turns into legislation.

The two privateness companies, the European Facts Security Board (EDPB) and European Facts Security Supervisor (EDPS), warned of the really superior dangers posed by remote biometric identification of people today in community parts.

“The EDPB and the EDPS simply call for a normal ban on any use of AI for automatic recognition of human characteristics in publicly available areas, this sort of as recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural alerts,” the two watchdogs explained in a joint feeling.

They explained AI techniques using biometrics to categorise people today into clusters based mostly on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation should also be banned.

Making use of the technological know-how to infer a person’s emotions should also be outlawed except for incredibly unique scenarios, this sort of as health applications, they explained.

“A normal ban on the use of facial recognition in publicly available parts is the needed setting up place if we want to preserve our freedoms and generate a human-centric lawful framework for AI,” EDPB Chair Andrea Jelinek and EDPS head Wojciech Wiewiorowski explained.

“The proposed regulation should also prohibit any kind of use of AI for social scoring, as it is versus the EU fundamental values and can guide to discrimination,” they explained.

Although the feeling is non-binding, it does have bodyweight with the Commission, EU nations and the European Parliament.