MEPs to vote on proposed ban on ‘Big Brother’ AI facial recognition on streets
Moves to ban live “Big Brother” real time facial recognition technology from being deployed across the streets of the EU or by border officials will be tested in a key vote at the European parliament on Thursday.
The amendment is part of a package of proposals for the world’s first artificial intelligence laws, which could result in firms being fined up to €10m (£8.7m) or removed from trading within the EU for breaches of the rules.
It is contained in one of 12 groups of compromise amendments agreed by a committee of MEPs, whittled down from more than 3,000 submitted a year ago.
But the ban, contained in a final text to be voted on in parliament on Thursday, is expected to be challenged by a group of centre-right MEPs on the grounds that biometric scanning should be deployed to combat serious crime such as terrorism.
If passed the law will also ban “emotional recognition” AI which could be used by employers or police to identify tired workers or drivers.
Charities have expressed concern that live real-time facial recognition would be open to abuse by state agencies and border police.
But Dragos Tudorache, co-rapporteur of the AI Act in the European parliament said he hoped there would be strong support for it to be forbidden.
“There is no stronger safeguard [than this ban]. A border crossing point is a public space. According to the text we have right now, you will not be able to deploy AI biometric recognition technology in a public space,” he said.
The act will also force those generating artificial intelligence to be transparent about which original literature, science research, music and other copyrighted materials it uses to train machine learners.
This will enable bands, academics and others to sue if they think copyright law has been breached.
Co-rapporteur Brando Benifei said he hoped the law would allay concerns over artificial intelligence disrupting employment markets and a potential deluge of fake news, disinformation and interference with human rights.
“With our text, we are also showing what kind of society we want, a society where social storing, predictive policing, biometric categorisation, emotional recognition, and discriminated
scraping of facial images from the internet are considered unacceptable practices,” he told reporters.
The amended text of the AI Act will go before the wider parliament in the middle of June and if voted through will represent a “strong” mandate in further discussions with the European