MEPs endorse blanket ban on facial recognition in public spaces

With 335 votes in favour and 235 against, lawmakers pushed to move forward with the sweeping prohibition, rejecting an amendment that could have paved the way for law enforcement to resort to biometric identification in exceptional cases.

Biometrics refers to systems that analyse biological features, such as facial traits, eye structures and fingerprints, to determine a person’s identity. Its possible use by government agencies has been often linked to authoritarian regimes.

The total ban is part of a draft piece of legislation, known as the Artificial Intelligence Act, that aims to ensure the development of human-centric, ethically responsible and environmentally sustainable AI systems across Europe.

The act as a whole was backed by 499 votes in favour, 28 against and 93 abstentions during a plenary session in Strasbourg.

The regulation, which is considered a world-first attempt to rein in AI’s excesses, still needs to be negotiated between the European Parliament and member states in what is known as a trilogue.

The talks, due to kick off on Wednesday evening, are expected to be intense and heavily influenced by the sudden emergence of chatbots, a rapidly evolving technology that policymakers are still trying to understand.

Brussels hopes to wrap up the AI Act before the end of the year.

The amendment rejected on Wednesday had been submitted by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and would have allowed law enforcement to use biometrics in three different cases: the search for missing people, the prevention of a terrorist attack and the detection of criminals who are wanted under a European arrest warrant.

MEPs also voted down an EPP-drafted recital that argued the risks posed by real-time biometrics in public spaces could, in exceptional cases, be “outweighed by the substantial benefits to society, persons and particularly children’s safety and life.”

The recital received 233 in favour but 327 against.

The original proposal presented by the European Commission in April 2021 classified the use of real-time biometrics in public spaces as having an unacceptable risk to citizens and therefore strictly prohibited.

The Commission, however, did include three targeted exemptions for law enforcement, which the EPP echoed in its amendment.

But when the file reached the European Parliament, MEPs decided to broaden the list of banned AI systems and did away with the dispensations foreseen for biometrics in public spaces, calling the technology “intrusive and discriminatory.”

The blacklist also includes biometric categorisation based on sensitive characteristics such as gender and race; predictive policing systems; emotion recognition systems in law enforcement, schools and work offices; and untargeted scraping of images obtained from the Internet in order to create facial recognition databases.

The possible use of biometrics by law enforcement has long been a controversial point of discussion, with many MEPs describing the practice as incompatible with democratic values. The debate has been inevitably shaped by developments in China, where the Communist Party has rolled out a massive, sophisticated network of facial recognition cameras to monitor the country’s population.