Abstract
Ahead of the EU negotiations for the adoption of the Artificial Intelligence Act, the European Parliament put forward several radical proposals. These included absolute prohibitions on two facial recognition applications of AI systems: real-time, remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces (remote biometric identification) and facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage (image scraping). In the event, the Parliament did not achieve its full ambition for the AI Act, yet its proposed prohibitions have pushed forward the re-thinking of citizen and consumer privacy and autonomy protection in Europe, underscoring data protection law’s fitness for purpose question.
Despite fundamental rights commitments to human dignity and autonomy, European law has a long running pattern of compromise between risks to privacy and the potential benefits of new technologies. While each compromise might be rational, the compounding effect of innumerable compromises has been a vast and irretrievable loss of privacy and informational autonomy. While capable of supporting robust regulatory intervention, EU data protection law has formed part of that pattern, enabling the growth of digital surveillance through its principles of legality, necessity and proportionality.
This chapter examines the significance of the Parliament’s proposed absolute bans on remote biometric identification and image scraping in light of this model of compromise and consequent surveillance encroachment. It concludes that, while facial recognition based surveillance is likely to expand through a myriad of technical innovations and normative accommodations, the movement to renew European fundamental rights for a digital society holds the potential for asserting human autonomy in the face of biometric surveillance.
Despite fundamental rights commitments to human dignity and autonomy, European law has a long running pattern of compromise between risks to privacy and the potential benefits of new technologies. While each compromise might be rational, the compounding effect of innumerable compromises has been a vast and irretrievable loss of privacy and informational autonomy. While capable of supporting robust regulatory intervention, EU data protection law has formed part of that pattern, enabling the growth of digital surveillance through its principles of legality, necessity and proportionality.
This chapter examines the significance of the Parliament’s proposed absolute bans on remote biometric identification and image scraping in light of this model of compromise and consequent surveillance encroachment. It concludes that, while facial recognition based surveillance is likely to expand through a myriad of technical innovations and normative accommodations, the movement to renew European fundamental rights for a digital society holds the potential for asserting human autonomy in the face of biometric surveillance.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Reconnaissance faciale: Défis techniques, juridiques et éthiques |
| Editors | Malik Bozzo-Rey, Anne Brunon-Ernst, Armelle Armelle Sabatier, Claire Wrobel |
| Place of Publication | Paris |
| Publisher | Editions Panthéon Assas, Paris |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 12 Dec 2023 |
Keywords
- facial recognition
- biometrics
- surveillance
- privacy
- data protection