EU Mulls Five-Year Ban on Facial Recognition Tech in Public Areas

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses. From a report: The plan by the EU's executive -- set out in an 18-page white paper -- comes amid a global debate about the systems driven by artificial intelligence and widely used by law enforcement agencies. The EU Commission said new tough rules may have to be introduced to bolster existing regulations protecting Europeans' privacy and data rights. "Building on these existing provisions, the future regulatory framework could go further and include a time-limited ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces," the EU document said.

Good luck

[paulhar]

Good luck with that. They'll immediately have to carve out exceptions for smartphones, and if they do that then the whole 'ban' would struggle to be usable.

A 'ban' by public bodies, sure, but the whole security exception basically means business as usual...

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[Anonymous Coward]

All people will do is separate the cameras from where the recognition happens, perhaps stream it off to a non-EU country.

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[Shaitan]

Obviously they did not forget about the phones... the phones are basically the only thing impacted. What they should target are security cameras and public CCTV and all public (read government) use of facial recognition IMHO.

Democracy can't exist without free speech/expression, free speech/expression can't truly exist where the government can pick and choose which expression/speech they to allow, anonymity is the best way to ensure there can be no consequences for any speech or expression. Facial recognitio

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[Anonymous Coward]

Read: Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days). Some interesting societal behavior changes occur when there are absolutely no secrets can be kept.

Zuckerberg could be a shoe-in for one of the main characters - Hiram Patterson - "As the main antagonist, he seems to be the personification of a misanthropic view of humanity – greedy, Machiavellian, and entirely self-serving." Sorry Larry Ellison - you *pale* in comparison to MZ!

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[LordWabbit2]

Anonymity died when we all agreed to carry tracking devices around in our pockets.

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[Shaitan]

Speak for yourself... and those tracking devices are given a high level of confidence while actually providing almost no confidence for tracking purposes. This can be exploited to fabricate location data pretty effortlessly.

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[LordWabbit2]

Speak for yourself.

I am, I am also speaking for you as well. You may KNOW how to obfuscate it, but I will bet money that you are not doing it. Or have ever done it. So as far as the people tracking you are concerned, it has a pretty high rate of fucking confidence.

This can be exploited to fabricate location data pretty effortlessly.

I'm sure it can, but I am also pretty sure that if you start travelling faster than the speed of sound from one location to another it's going to raise a few flags, and then

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[sabri]

They should be ashamed

This is the only part of your comment that makes sense.

They EU tries to mimic the US in terms of powers to create laws which govern all of its member states. What the EU forgets is that nobody voted for them. In fact, in some countries people explicitly voted against them. In this case, the EU makes a far-reaching decision which halts innovation.

And then they wonder how Brexit is possible.

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[Teun]

You are regarding the EU soooo badly informed.
Any EU legislation needs to be approved by the duly elected parliament and the Counsel whose members are appointed by duly elected national governments.
Also, the EU issues 'directives' and the member nations need to implement legislation to comply, meaning they have a certain amount of freedom how they implement the requirements of said directives.

The outcome of the Brexit vote was seriously influenced by fake news spread by the infamous British tabloids, th

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[dunkelfalke]

https://www.businessinsider.de... [businessinsider.de]

I wonder if they will put that on the side of a bus.

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[gweihir]

Recording somebody without consent already is a criminal act in the EU. So no, they do not have to do that.

New tech, unknown implications. Seems resonable.

[xpiotr]

E.U. get some things right.

Easy workaround

[Kohath]

Send the image data to a non-EU country to run facial recognition.

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[Teun]

As this 'sending' would not happen by accident the sender would still be guilty.

Giving everyone else a head start, nice

[Micah NC]

this is a gift to the US and Japan

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[Teun]

The technology is not the problem, here the main worry is about what is done with the results, not only because present systems still have many false-positives.