The European Union is on track to become the first geopolitical entity to regulate artificial intelligence and to put an outright ban on some of its use cases, such as facial recognition for surveillance.
This week, the European Parliament passed a resolution to outlaw the use of artificial intelligence-based mass surveillance through technologies such as facial recognition systems. The resolution was passed with 36 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voting in favor of the ban that would permanently prohibit the use of remote monitoring and surveillance in public spaces across the European Union.
24 MEPs voted against the ban, with six abstaining. The motion is carried a few months after the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) presented a joint front to support the European Commission’s April proposal for regulating uses of AI that can lead to discrimination.
“Deploying remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces means the end of anonymity in those places. Applications such as live facial recognition interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms. This calls for an immediate application of the precautionary approach,†saidOpens a new window Andrea JelinekOpens a new window , EDPB chair, & Wojciech WiewiórowskiOpens a new window , EDPS, back in June 2021.
“A general ban on the use of facial recognition in publicly accessible areas is the necessary starting point if we want to preserve our freedoms and create a human-centric legal framework for AI. The proposed regulation should also prohibit any type of use of AI for social scoring, as it is against the EU fundamental values and can lead to discrimination.â€
The move comes after concerns of AI bias against individuals being categorized through biometric technologies based on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation, etc. This may stem from a lack of clarity in the algorithmic decision-making process. Moreover, the European Commission noted how AI necessarily requires personal data, which is in a way an intrusion of individual privacy.
See More: EU Wants Organizations to Use AI Responsibly, Here’s Possibly How
Through the resolution, the European Parliament also called on to ban predictive policing, i.e., profiling individuals for a crime they haven’t even committed yet. It notes that predictive policing entails data set analysis to identify patterns but can in no way determine causality or make reliable predictions of individual behavior.
This may lead to differential treatment, direct as well as indirect discrimination of groups of people. Furthermore, the EU law guarantees an individual to have rights under which they cannot be subjected to “a decision which produces legal effects concerning them or significantly affects them and is based solely on automated data processing.â€
The European Parliament also called on to ban the following:
- Individual monitoring in public spaces. Only criminal suspects should be monitored
- Use of private facial recognition databases such as the Clearview AI database. Clearview AI database is based on three billion images sourced illicitly from the internet, including social media
- Social scoring systems used to gauge the trustworthiness of citizens
- Remote identification of individuals; cites border control gates and iBorderCtrl lie-detection system as examples
“Notwithstanding the benefits brought by AI, the fact is that simultaneously AI entails a number of potential risks, such as opaque decision-making, different types of discrimination, intrusion into our private lives, challenges to the protection of personal data, human dignity, and the freedom of expression and information. These potential risks are aggravated in the sector of law enforcement and criminal justice, as they may affect the presumption of innocence, the fundamental rights to liberty and security of the individual and to an effective remedy and fair trial.â€
Even though the move is welcome, it only covers the use of AI-based tech and could fall short of actually protecting individual privacy. For instance, organizations can still use cameras to identify citizens. Just that the images captured through them cannot be used for AI-driven processing.
In any case, this is the first time that the EU has officially conveyed its stand, advocating against the use of AI-based biometrics and surveillance. Besides the EU, individual cities such as San Francisco, CA; Boston, MA; Portland (ME and OR), and others have banned the use of facial recognition by the police.
In April 2021, the EU also introduced the Artificial Intelligence Act to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the 27-nation bloc.
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