European Regulators Call to Ban Facial Recognition in the EU

In the European Union, calls have been made to ban the use of artificial intelligence in facial recognition, gait analysis, fingerprints, and the processing of other biometric data. About this говорится in a joint statement by the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor.

“The deployment of remote biometric identification in public spaces signals the end of anonymity. Technologies such as real-time facial recognition infringe fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they call into question their very essence,” the statement says.

Regulators recommend banning AI systems that classify people by ethnicity, gender, political opinions or other personal characteristics to avoid potential discrimination.

“The proposed regulation should also ban any use of artificial intelligence for assessing social scores, as this runs counter to the EU’s fundamental values,” they added.

Authors of the open letter also consider the use of AI for emotion recognition to be highly undesirable and should be banned with some exceptions. Regulators suggested that this technology might be permissible, for example, in the medical field to determine a patient’s condition.

They added that a full ban on facial recognition in public places would be a starting point for preserving freedom and creating a human-centered legal framework for AI.

In April, the European Commission presented a draft on the use of AI in the EU. The document would ban the deployment of most mass-surveillance technologies, but would not affect facial recognition systems.

Following the publication of the draft, the European Data Protection Supervisor called for restricting the use of facial recognition.

A group of 56 European human rights organizations also urged the European Commission to ban facial biometric identification technologies without any exemptions.

Subscribe to ForkLog News on Telegram: ForkLog AI — all the news from the AI world!